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The Glory of English Prose 
Letters to my Grandson 




STEPHEN COLERIDGE 

FROM THE PQRTRAtT BY BERNARD PARTRIDGE IN THE POSSESSION OF 
THE MESS OF THE SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT 



The 
Glory of English Prose 

Letters to My Grandson 



By 

The Hon. Stephen Coleridge 



"The chief glory of every people arises from its authors" 

Dr. Johnson 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Cbc ■R^nicftcrbocher press 

1922 






Copyright, 1922 

by 

Stephen Coleridge 

Made in the United States of America 



Z^*^ 




StP \Si\i22 ©CI,A681769 



PREFACE 

If you have read, gentle reader, the earHer 
series of Letters to my Grandson on the World 
about Him, you are to understand that in the 
interval between those letters and these, An- 
tony has grown to be a boy in the sixth form 
of his public school. 

It has not been any longer necessary there- 
fore to study an extreme simplicity of diction 
in these letters. 

My desire has been to lead him into the most 
glorious company in the world, in the hope 
that, having early made friends with the no- 
blest of human aristocracy, he will never after- 
wards admit to his affection and intimacy 
anything mean or vulgar. 

Many young people who, like Antony, are 
not at all averse from the study of English 
writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the 



Preface 

field before them, and their hearts quail before 
what seems so gigantic an enterprise. 

In these letters I have acted as pilot for a 
first voyage through what is to a boy an un- 
charted sea, after which I hope and believe he 
will have learned happily to steer for himself 
among the islands of the blest. 



S. C. 



The Ford, 

Chobham. 



VI 



CONTENTS 



1 . On Good and Bad Style in Prose 

2. On the Glory of the Bible 

3. Sir Walter Raleigh . 

4. Act of Parliament, 1532 

5. The Judicious Hooker and Shake 

SPEARE .... 

6. Lord Chief Justice Crewe . 

7. Sir Thomas Browne and Milton 

8. Jeremy Taylor 

9. Evelyn's Diary 

10. John Bunyan 

11. Dr. Johnson 

12. Edmund Burke 

13. Gibbon 

14. Henry Grattan and Macaulay 

15. Lord Erskine 

vii 



I 

8 
17 

23 

27 
32 
36 

43 

48 

53 

58 
70 

73 
77 
87 





Contents 










PAGE 


i6. 


Robert Hall 91 


17. 


Lord Plunket 






103 


18. 


Robert Southey . 






107 


19. 


Walter Savage Landor 






112 


20. 


Lord Brougham . 






125 


21. 


Sir William Napier 






134 


22. 


Richard Sheil 






140 


23- 


Thomas Carlyle . 






146 


24. 


Henry Nelson Coleridge 






157 


25- 


Cardinal Newman 






163 


26. 


Lord Macaulay Again 






171 


27. 


President Lincoln 






180 


28. 


John Ruskin 






184 


29. 


James Anthony Froude 






195 


30- 


Matthew Arnold 






201 


31- 


Sir William Butler 






. 206 


32. 


Lord Morley 






. 2X2 


33- 


Hilaire Belloc . 






. 218 


34- 


King George the Fifth 






. 222 


35- 


Conclusion . 






. 229 



Vlll 



The Glory of English Prose 
Letters to my Grandson 



LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON 

I 

My dear Antony, 

The letters which I wrote "On the world 
about you" having shown you that through- 
out all the universe, from the blazing orbs in 
infinite space to the tiny muscles of an insect's 
wing, perfect design is everywhere manifest, 
I hope and trust that you will never believe 
that so magnificent a process and order can be 
without a Mind of which it is the visible 
expression. 

The chief object of those letters was to 
endorse your natural feeling of reverence for 
the Great First Cause of all things, with the 
testimony of your reason; and to save you 
from ever allowing knowledge of how the sap 
rises in its stalk to lessen your wonder at and 
admiration of the loveliness of a flower. 



Letters to my Grandson 

I am now going to write to you about the 
literature of England and show you, if I can, 
the immense gulf that divides distinguished 
writing and speech from vulgar writing and 
speech. 

There is nothing so vulgar as an ignorant 
use of your own language. 

Every Englishman should show that he 
respects and honours the glorious language of 
his country, and will not willingly degrade it 
with his own pen or tongue. 

"We have long preserved our constitution," 
said Dr. Johnson ; "let us make some struggles 
for our language." 

There is no need to be priggish or fantastic 
in our choice of words or phrases. 

Simple old words are just as good as any 
that can be selected, if you use them in their 
proper sense and place. 

By reading good prose constantly your ear 
will come to know the harmony of language, 
and you will find that your taste will un- 
erringly tell you what is good and what is 



The Glory of English Prose 

bad in style, without your being able to explain 
even to yourself the precise quality that dis- 
tinguishes the good from the bad. 

Any Englishman with a love of his country 
and a reverence for its language can say 
things in a few words that will find their way 
straight into our hearts, Antony, and make us 
all better men. I will tell you a few of such 
simple sayings that are better than any more 
laboured writings. 

On the 30th of June, 1921, in the Times 
In Memoriam column there was an entry: — 
"To the undying memory of officers, non- 
commissioned officers and men of the 9th and 
loth battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I. ^ who were 
killed in the attack on Fricourt in the first 
battle of the Somme ' ' ; and below it there were 
placed these splendid words : — 

"Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts. " 

In February of 19 13 news reached England 
of the death, after reaching the South Pole, of 

' King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. 
3 



Letters to my Grandson 

four explorers, Captain Scott, their leader, 
among them. 

Shortly before the end, Captain Gates, a man 
of fortune who joined the expedition from pure 
love of adventure, knowing that his helpless- 
ness with frozen feet was retarding the desper- 
ate march of the others towards their ship, 
rose up and stumbled out of the tent into a 
raging blizzard, saying, "I dare say I shall be 
away some time." 

This was greatly said. His body was never 
found; but the rescue party who afterwards 
discovered the tent with the others dead in it, 
put up a cairn in the desolate waste of snow 
with this inscription : — 

"Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, 
Captain L. E. G. Gates, Inniskilling Dragoons, 
who, on their return from the Pole in March, 19 12, 
willingly walked to his death in a blizzard to try 
and save his comrades beset with hardship. " 

All this was done, said, and written, very 
nobly by all concerned. 

4 



The Glory of English Prose 

In St. Paul's Cathedral their lies a recum- 
bent effigy of General Gordon, who gave his 
life for the honour of England at Khartoum, 
and upon it are engraven these words : — 

"He gave his strength to the weak, his sub- 
stance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, 
his heart to God." 

Even the concentrated terseness of Latin 
cannot surpass these examples of the power of 
the simplest and shortest English sentences to 
penetrate to the heart, 

English can be used, by those who master it 
as an organ of expression, to convey deep 
emotion under perfect control, than which 
nothing is more moving, nothing better calcu- 
lated to refine the mind, nothing more certain 
to elevate the character. 

Whenever a man has something fine to 
communicate to his fellow-men he has but to 
use English without aifectation, honestly and 
simply, and he is in possession of the most splen- 
did vehicle of htiman thought in the world. 

5 



Letters to my Grandson 

All the truly great writers of English speak 
with simplicity from their hearts, they all 
evince a spirit of imaffected reverence, they 
all teach us to look up and not down, and by 
the nobility of their works which have pene- 
trated into every home where letters are 
cultivated, they have done an incalculable 
service in forming and sustaining the high 
character of our race. 

Clever flippant writers may do a trifling 
service here and there by ridiculing the pomp- 
ous and deflating the prigs, but there is no 
permanence in such work, unless — which is 
seldora the case — it is totally devoid of per- 
sonal vanity. 

Very little such service is rendered when it 
emanates from a writer who announces himself 
as equal if not superior to Shakespeare, and 
embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of 
the creeds. 

"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his 
"Glass of Fashion" shown us that the Society 
depicted in the books of Colonel Repington 

6 



The Glory of English Prose 

and Mrs. Asquith is not the true and great 
Society that sustains England in its noble 
station among civilised peoples, and we may 
be siu"e that neither do these books in the 
faintest degree represent the true and living 
literature of the times. They will pass away 
and be forgotten as utterly as are the fashion 
plates and missing-word competitions of ten 
years ago. 

Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous 
and living literature of England, that has 
survived all the shocks of time and changes 
of modern life, is the best and properest study 
for a man to fit him for life, to refine his taste, 
to aggravate his wisdom, and consolidate his 
character. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



My dear Antony, 

I alluded, in my first letter to you about 
English literature, to the necessity of your 
learning from the beginning the wide distinc- 
tion between what is good and what is bad 
style. 

I do not know a better instance of a display 
of the difference between what is fine style and. 
what is not, than may be made by putting 
side by side almost any sentence from the old 
authorised translation of the Bible and the 
same sentence from The Bible in Modern 
Speech. 

I will just put two quotations side by side : — 

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they 
grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and 
yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his 
glory was not arrayed like one of these. " 
8 



The Glory of English Prose 

"Learn a lesson from the wild lilies. Watch 
their growth. They neither toil nor spin, and 
yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his 
magnificence could array himself like one of 
these." 

Here you can feel the perfect harmony and 
balance of the old version and the miserable 
commonplaceness of the effort of these mis- 
guided modern men. 

Again : — 

' ' Repent ye : for the kingdom of heaven is at 
hand." 

This is mauled into : — 

"Repent, he said, for the kingdom of the 
heavens is now close at hand. " 

These examples are perfectly suited to 
illustrate the immense difference that sepa- 
rates what is noble and fine in style and what 
is poor and third rate. 

If you recite the old version aloud you cannot 
9 



Letters to my Grandson 

escape the harmony and balance of the sen- 
tences, and nothing dignified or distinguished 
can be made of the wretched paraphrases of 
the two desecrators of the splendid old text. 

And, Antony, I would have you know that 
I, who have spent a long life in precious libra- 
ries, loving fine literature with all my heart, 
have long ago reverenced the old version of 
the Bible as the granite comer-stone upon 
which has been built all the noblest English in 
the world. No narrative in literature has yet 
surpassed in majesty, simplicity, and passion 
the story of Joseph and his brethren, begin- 
ning at the thirty-seventh and ending with the 
forty-fifth chapter of Genesis. There is surely 
nothing more moving and lovely in all the 
books in the British Museum than the picture 
of Joseph when he sees his little brother among 
his brethren : — 

"And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother 
Benjamin, his mother's son, and said, Is this 
your younger brother, of whom ye spake to me ? 
And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son. 

lO 



The Glory of English Prose 

"And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did 
yearn upon his brother : and he sought where to 
weep ; and he entered into his chamber, and wept 
there. " 

The whole of the forty-fifth chapter is touch- 
ing and beautiful beyond all criticism, tran- 
scending all art. To read it is to believe 
every word of it to be true, and to recognise 
the sublimity of such a relation. 

No narrative of the great Greek writers 
reaches the heart so directly and poignantly as 
does this astonishing story. It moves swiftly 
and surely along from incident to incident till 
Joseph's loving soul can contain itself no 
more : — 

"Then Joseph could not refrain himself be- 
fore all of them that stood by him; and he 
cried. Cause every man to go out from me. 

"And there stood no man with him, while 
Joseph made himself known unto his brethren. 

' ' And he wept aloud : and the Egyptians and 
the house of Pharaoh heard. 
II 



Letters to my Grandson 

"And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am 
Joseph ; doth my father yet live ? 

"And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's 
neck, and wept; and Benjamin wept upon his 
neck. Moreover he kissed all his brethren and 
wept upon them. 

"And after that his brethren talked with 
him." 

And this wonderful chapter ends thus : — 

"And they went up out of Egypt, and came 
unto the land of Canaan unto Jacob their father, 
and told him, saying, Joseph is yet alive, and is 
governor over all the land of Egypt. 

"And Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed 
them not. 

"And they told him all the words of Joseph, 
which he had said unto them : and when he saw 
the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him, 
the spirit of Jacob their father revived : 

"And Israel said, Jt is enough; Joseph my 
son is yet alive : I will go and see him before I 
die." 

12 



The Glory of English Prose 

If you read the story of Joseph through from, 
start to finish, you will see that it is a perfect 
narrative of the life of a man without fault, 
who suffered much but without resentment, 
was great of heart in evil days, and, when 
Fortime placed him in a position of glory and 
greatness, showed a stainless magnanimity and 
a brotherly love that nothing could abate. It 
is the first and most perfect story in literature 
of the nobility of raan's soul, and as such it 
must remain a treasured and priceless posses- 
sion to the world's end. 

In the short Book of Ruth there lies em- 
balmed in the finest English a very tender love 
story, set in all the sweet surroundings of the 
ripening corn, the gathered harvest, and the 
humble gleaners. Nothing can be more de- 
lightful than the direction of Boaz, the great 
land-owner, to his men, after he had espied 
Ruth in her beauty gleaning in his fields : — 

"And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz 
commanded his young men, saying, Let her glean 
even among the sheaves, and reproach her not : 
13 



Letters to my Grandson 

"And let fall also some of the handfuls on 
purpose for her, and leave them, that she may 
glean them, and rebuke her not. " 

This little gem m the books of the Bible 
inspired Hood to write one of his most perfect 
lyrics : — 

"She stood breast high amid the corn 
Clasped by the golden light of morn, 
Like the sweetheart of the sun, 
Who many a glowing kiss had won. 

Thus she stood amid the stooks, 
Praising God with sweetest looks. 

Sure, I said, Heaven did not mean 
Where I reap thou should 'st but glean; 
Lay thy sheaf adown and come, 
Share my harvest and my home." 

That the Bible was translated into English 
at the time when the language was spoken 
and written in its most noble form, by men 
whose style has never been siirpassed in 

14 



The Glory of English Prose 

strength combined with simpHcity, has been a 
priceless blessing to the English-speaking race. 
The land of its birth, once flowing with milk 
and honey, has been for long centuries a place 
of barren rocks and arid deserts: Persians 
and Greeks and Romans and Turks have 
successively swept over it; the descendants 
of those who at different times produced its 
different books are scattered to the ends of the 
earth ; but the English translation has for long 
years been the head corner-stone in homes 
inntimerable as the sands of the sea in number. 

No upheavals of the earth, no fire, pesti- 
lence, famine, or slaughter, can ever now blot 
it out from the ken of men. 

When all else is lost we may be sure that 
the old English version of the Bible will 
survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, 
but my words shall not pass away." 

Do not think it enough therefore, Antony, to 
hear it read badly and without intelligence or 
emotion, in little detached snippets, in church 
once a week. 

15 



Letters to my Grandson 

Read it for yourself, and learn to rejoice in 
the perfect balance, harmony, and strength 
of its noble style. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



i6 



My dear Antony, 

I could write you many letters like my last 
one about the Bible, and perhaps some day I 
will go back to that wonderful Book and write 
you some more letters about it ; but now I will 
go on and tell you about some of the great 
writers of English prose that came after the 
translation of the Bible. 

Those translators were the great founders 
of the English language, which is probably on 
the whole the most glorious organ of human 
expression that the world has yet known. 

It blends the classic purity of Greek and the 
stately severity of Latin with the sanguine 
passions and noble emotions of our race. 

A whole life devoted to its study will not 
make you or me perfectly familiar with all the 
splendid passages that have been spoken and 

17 



Letters to my Grandson 

written in it. But I shall show in my letters, 
at least some of the glorious utterances scat- 
tered aroimd me here in my library, so that 
you may recognise, as you ought, the pomp 
and majesty of the speech of England. 

One of the great qualities that was always 
present in the writings of Englishmen from 
the time of Elizabeth down to the beginning 
of the nineteenth century was its restraint. 

Those men never became hysterical or lost 
their perfect self-control. 

The deeper the emotion of the writer the 
more manifest became the noble mastery of 
himself. 

When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son 
of Devon, from which county you and I, 
Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the 
Tower of London awaiting his cowardly and 
shameful execution the next day at the hands 
of that miserable James I., writing to his 
beloved wife, with a piece of coal, because they 
even denied him pen and ink, face to face with 
death, he yet observed a calm and noble 

i8 



The Glory of English Prose 

language that is truly magnifical — to use the 
old Bible word. 

"For the rest," he wrote, "when you have 
travailed and wearied your thoughts on all sorts 
of worldly cogitations, you shall sit down by 
sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to 
serve and fear God while he is young, that the 
fear of God may grow up in him. Then will 
God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto 
him; a Husband and a Father which can never 
be taken from you. 

"I cannot write much. God knows how 
hardly I stole this time when all sleep ; and it is 
time to separate my thoughts from the world. 

' ' Beg my dead body, which living was denied 
you ; and either lay it at Sherburne, if the land 
continue, or in Exeter Church by my father and 
mother. I can write no more. Time and 
Death call me away. 

"The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and 
Inscrutable God, that Almighty God that is 
goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life and 
light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on 
me and teach me to forgive my persecutors and 
19 



Letters to my Grandson 

false accusers, and send us to meet in His Glo- 
rious Kingdom. My true wife, farewell. Bless 
my poor boy, pray for me. My true God hold 
you both in His Arms. 

"Written with the dying hand of, sometime 
thy husband, but now alas! overthrown, yours 
that was, but now not my own. 

"Walter Ralegh." 

Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to 
his untimely end, had written in his great 
History of the World a wonderful passage 
about death; it is justly celebrated, and is 
familiar to all men of letters throughout the 
world, so I will quote a portion of it for you: — 

"The Kings and Princes of the world have 
always laid before them the actions, but not the 
ends, of those great ones which preceded them. 
They are always transported with the glory of 
the one, but they never mind the misery of the 
other, till they find the experience in themselves. 
"They neglect the advice of God, while they 
enjoy life, or the hope of it ; but they follow the 

20 



The Glory of English Prose 

counsel of Death upon the first approach. It is 
he that puts into man all the wisdom of the 
world, without speaking a word; which God, 
with all the Words of His Law, promises and 
threats, doth not infuse. 

"Death which hateth and destroyeth man is 
believed; God which hath made him and loves 
him is always deferred. It is, therefore. Death 
alone that can suddenly make man to know 
himself. He tells the proud and insolent that 
they are but abjects, and humbles them at the 
instant ; makes them cry, complain and repent ; 
yea, even to hate their fore-passed happiness. 

"He takes account of the rich, and proves 
him a beggar ; a naked beggar which hath inter- 
est in nothing but in the gravel that fills his 
mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the 
most beautiful and makes them see therein their 
deformity and rottenness, and they acknowledge 
it. 

"O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom 
none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what 
none have dared thou hast done; and whom all 
the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out 

21 



Letters to my Grandson 

of the world and despised; thou hast drawn 
together all the far-stretched greatness, all the 
pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered 
it all over with these two narrow words — hic 

JACET. " 

Sir Walter Ralegh was bom only a few miles 
down below Ottery St. Mary, in the same 
beautiful valley from which you and I, Antony, 
and the poet have come. The peal of bells 
in the old church tower at Otterton was given 
by him to the parish; and when "the lin Ian 
lone of evening bells" floats across between 
the hills that guard the river Otter, it should 
fall upon our ears as an echo of the melody 
that strikes upon our hearts in Ralegh's words. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



22 



My dear Antony, 

In looking through some very old Acts of 
Parliament not long ago I was rather sur- 
prised to find that in those old times our 
forefathers drew up their statutes in very- 
stately English. 

In our own times Acts of Parliament fre- 
quently violate the simplest rules of grammar, 
and are sometimes so unintelligible as to need 
the labours of learned judges to find out what 
they mean ! 

But it seems that in the great days of Henry 
VIII. and Elizabeth Acts of Parliament were 
often written in resotmding periods of solemn 
splendour of which the meaning is perfectly 
clear. 

In the twenty-foirrth year of the great 
Henry, the Act denying and forbidding any 

23 



Letters to my Grandson 

jurisdiction of the Pope of Rome in England 
was passed. 

This Act, depriving the Pope of all power in 
England, marked a turning-point in history. 

It is headed with these words : — 

The Pre-Eminence, Power, and Authority 
OF THE King of England. 1532. 

"Where by divers sundry old authentic his- 
tories and chronicles it is manifestly declared 
and expressed that this realm of England is an 
Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, 
governed by one supreme head and King having 
the dignity and royal estate of the imperial 
crown of the same, unto whom a body politic 
compact of all sorts and degrees of people, di- 
vided in terms and by names of spiritualty and 
temporalty being bounden and owen to bear 
next to God a natural and humble obedience; 
he being also institute and furnished by the 
goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with 
plenary whole and entire power pre-eminence 
authority prerogative and jurisdiction to render 
and yield justice and final determination to all 
24 



The Glory of English Prose 

manner of folk residents or subjects within this 
his realm, in all causes matters debates conten- 
tions happening to occur insurge or begin within 
the limits thereof without restraint or provoca- 
tion to any foreign princes or potentates of the 
world ... all causes testamentary, causes of 
matrimony and divorces, rights of tithes, obla- 
tions and obventions . . . shall be from hence- 
forth heard examined licenced clearly finally and 
definitely adjudged and determined within the 
King's jurisdiction and authority and not else- 
where. " 

The words "Empire" and "Imperial" are 
in the present day degraded from their ancient 
high estate by an appropriation of them to 
advertise soap or cigarettes or what not; and 
we even are confronted with the "Imperial" 
Cancer Research Fund, the money of which 
has been employed in artificially inflicting 
cancer on hundreds of thousands of living 
animals — a performance utterly repugnant to 
a great many of the inhabitants in the 
"Empire"! 

25 



Letters to my Grandson 

But people indifferent to the dictates of 
mercy are not likely to have much reverence 
for words, however august. 

Henry VIIL, we may be sure, would never 
have allowed these solemn words to be used 
by people with something to sell, or by scienti- 
fic disease-mongers. 

They were great people who could draw up 
their statutes in splendid passages of sus- 
tained nobility. 

Let us, Antony, salute them across the 
centuries. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



26 



My dear Antony, 

One of the great creators of English prose 
who Hved at the same time as Ralegh and 
Shakespeare was Richard Hooker, who is 
generally known as "the Judicious Hooker." 

He was born in Devon, two years after 
Ralegh, in 1554. 

He must very early in life have made his 
mark as a man of learning and piety, for when 
he was only thirty-one he was made Master of 
the Temple. The controversies in which he 
there found himself involved induced him to 
retire when he was only thirty-seven into the 
country, for the purpose of writing his famous 
books. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. 

It is the first great book on the English 
Church, and it is full of magnificent prose. It 
was divided into eight parts; and in the first 

27 



Letters to my Grandson 

one, before he had got far into it, he penned the 
exclamatory description of law which will live 
as long as the language: — 

' ' Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the 
harmony of the world ; all things in heaven and 
earth do her homage, the very least as feeling 
her care, the greatest as not exempted from her 
power." 

And in the same first part will be found a 
passage on the Deity which portrays faithfully 
for us the himible wisdom of both the man 
and his age : — 

"Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of 
man to wade far into the doings of the Most 
High; whom although to know be life, and joy to 
make mention of His name; yet our soundest 
knowledge is to know that we know Him not as 
indeed He is, neither can know Him; and our 
safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, 
when we confess without confession that His 
glory is inexplicable, His greatness above our 
28 



The Glory of English Prose 

capacity to reach. He is above and we upon 
earth; therefore it behoveth our words to be 
wary and few. " 

Shakespeare was bom ten years later than 
Hooker, in 1564, and his share in founding 
Enghsh prose as we know it is, of course, not 
comparable with that of Hooker, for of Shake- 
speare's prose there remains for us but little. 
Whenever he rose to eloquence he clothed him- 
self in verse as with an inevitable attribute, 
but on the rare occasions when he conde- 
scended to step down from the great line to 
' ' the other harmony of prose " he is as splendid 
as in all else. In Hamlet we have this sudden 
passage : — 

"I have of late, (but wherefore I know not), 
lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exer- 
cises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my 
disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, 
seems to me a sterile promontory; this most 
excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave 
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof 
29 



Letters to my Grandson 

fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other 
thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congre- 
gation of vapours. 

' ' What a piece of work is man ! How noble 
in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and 
moving, how express and admirable ! in action, 
how like an angel ! in apprehension, how like a 
god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of 
animals! And yet to me what is this quintes- 
sence of dust?" 

And the most beautiful letter in the world is 
that written by Antonio to Bassanio in The 
Merchant of Venice. When it is remembered 
that it was out of his friendship for Bassanio 
that Antonio entered into his bond with Shy- 
lock, the supreme exquisiteness of the few 
words from friend to friend render this letter 
unstirpassable : — 

"Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all mis- 
carried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is 
very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and 
since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, 
all debts are cleared between you and me if I 
30 



The Glory of English Prose 

might see you at my death; notwithstanding, 
use your pleasure ; if your love do not persuade 
you to come, let not my letter. " 

Well did Shakespeare know that such a 
letter must make an instant appeal to the 
sweet heart of Portia: "O love!" she cries, 
"despatch all business, and be gone!" 

All great poets are masters of a splendid 
prose, and had Shakespeare written some 
notable work of prose we may be stire it would 
even have surpassed the noble utterances of 
all his wonderful contemporaries. 

It has been said that no language in the 
world has yet ever lasted in its integrity for 
over a thousand years. Perhaps printing 
may confer a greater stability on present 
languages ; but whenever English is displaced, 
the sun of the most glorious of all days will 
have set. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



31 



My dear Antony, 

I do not think that men of letters often 
search through the old law reports for speci- 
mens of fine prose, but I believe that here and 
there, in that generally barren field, a nugget 
of pure gold may be discovered by an industri- 
ous student. 

Much noble prose delivered from the bench 
down the centuries has been lost for ever, for 
the judges of England have often been gentle- 
men of taste, scholarship, and eloquence. I 
have found one very splendid passage that has 
somehow survived the wrecks of nearly four 
hundred years. 

Lord Chief Justice Crewe, who became 
Chief Justice of England in 1624, deHvered 
in the case of the Earl of Oxford the following 
noble tribute to the great house of De Vere : — 

32 



The Glory of English Prose 

"I heard a great peer of this realm, and 
learned, say, when he lived, there was no king 
in Christendom had such a subject as Oxford. 
He came in with the Conqueror, Earl of Guienne ; 
shortly after the Conquest made Great Cham- 
berlain, above 400 years ago, by Henry I., the 
Conqueror's son ; confirmed by Henry II. This 
great honour — this high and noble dignity — hath 
continued ever since, in the remarkable surname 
De Vere, by so many ages, descents, and gener- 
ations, as no other kingdom can produce such a 
peer in one and the selfsame name and title. I 
find in all this time but two attainders of this 
noble family, and those in stormy and tempest- 
uous time, when the government was unsettled, 
and the kingdom in competition. I have la- 
boured to make a covenant with myself, that 
affection may not press upon judgment, for I sup- 
pose that there is no man that hath any appre- 
hension of gentry or nobleness, but his affection 
stands to the continuance of so noble a name and 
fame, and would take hold of a twig or twine- 
thread to uphold it. And yet Time hath his re- 
volutions : there must be an end to all temporal 

i 33 



Letters to my Grandson 

things, finis rerum, — and end of names and dig- 
nities, and whatsoever is terrene; and why not 
of De Vere? For where is De Bohun? — where 
is Mowbray? — where is Mortimer? Nay, what 
is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? 
They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres 
of mortality. And yet, let the name and dig- 
nity of De Vere stand so long as it pleases God. " 

And alas! we can now ask, Where is De 
Vere? This great Earldom of Oxford was 
created in 1142, and has disappeared long ago 
in the limbo of peerages said to be in abeyance. 

In these days, Antony, when peerages are 
bought by men successful in trade and sold by 
men successful in intrigue, such elevations in 
rank have ceased to be regarded as the neces- 
sary concomitants of "great honour" and 
"high and noble dignity"; so that it has long 
been more reputable in the House of Lords 
to be a descendant than an ancestor. But 
among the older great families there still 
remains a pride that has descended unsullied 
through many generations, which serves as a 

34 



The Glory of English Prose 

fine deterrent from evil deeds, and a constant 
incentive to honour — and in England the 
history of great names can never be totally- 
ignored, even though the country may be 
ruled by persons who do not know who were 
their own grandfathers. 

Nothing is more ridiculous and cheap than 
to sneer at honourable descent from famous 
ancestors ; it divertingly illustrates the fable of 
the sour grapes. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



35 



My dear Antony, 

You will have seen from the extracts I have 
already quoted to you of the write s of the 
Elizabethan age that the style of all of them 
possesses something large and resonant, some- 
thing that may be said to constitute the 
"grand style" in prose; and this quite natur- 
ally without effort, and without the slightest 
touch of affectation. 

A great writer who came immediately 
after the Elizabethans^ — namely, Sir Thomas 
Browne, who lived from 1605 to 1682 — displays 
the development in his style of something less 
simple and more precious than ruled in he 
former generation. 

It is difficult to select any passage from his 
works where all is so good. He was curious 
and exact in his choice of words and com- 

36 



The Glory of English Prose 

manded a wide vocabulary. There is deliber- 
ate ingenuity in the framing of his sentences, 
which arrests attention and markedly distin- 
guishes his style. His Urn Burial, in spite of 
its elaboration, reaches a grave and solemn 
splendour. 

The fifth chapter, which begins by speaking 
of the dead who have "quietly rested under 
the drums and tramplings of three conquests," 
rises to a very noble elevation as English prose. 

Here I quote one paragraph of it, char- 
acteristic of the whole : — 

"Darkness and light divide the course of time, 
and oblivion shares with memory a great part 
even of our living beings ; we slightly remember 
our felicities, and the smartest strokes of afflic- 
tion leave but short smart upon us. Sense endur- 
eth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or 
themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Af- 
flictions induce callosities ; miseries are slippery, 
or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstand- 
ing is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant 
of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, 
37 



Letters to my Grandson 

is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we 
digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and, 
our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting 
remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by 
the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity 
contented their hopes of subsistency with a 
transmigration of their souls, — a good way to 
continue their memories, while having the 
advantage of plural successions they could not 
but act something remarkable in such variety 
of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed 
selves, make accumulation of glory unto their 
last durations. Others, rather than be lost in 
the uncomfortable night of nothing, were con- 
tent to recede into the common being, and make 
one particle of the public soul of all things, which 
was no more than to return into their unknown 
and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity 
was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in 
sweet consistencies, to attend the return of their 
souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind, 
and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which 
Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now 
consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise. 
38 



The Glory of English Prose 

Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for 
balsams." 



Milton was a contemporary of Sir Thomas 
Browne, and, like all great poets, was a 
master of resounding prose. All that he 
wrote, both in verse and prose, is severely 
classic in its form. His Samson Agonistes is 
perhaps the finest example of a play written 
in English after the manner of the Greek 
dramas. 

Milton wrote The Areopagitica in defence of 
the liberty of publishers and printers of books. 
And it stands for all time as the first and great- 
est argument against interference with the 
freedom of the press. 

The Areopagitae were judges at Athens in its 
more flourishing time, who sat on Mars Hill 
and made decrees and passed sentences which 
were delivered in public and commanded uni- 
versal respect. 

I will quote one of the finest passages in this 
great and splendid utterance:— 

39 



Letters to my Grandson 

' ' I deny not but that it is of greatest concern- 
ment in the Church and Commonwealth to have 
a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as 
well as men ; and thereafter to confine, imprison, 
and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors : 
for books are not absolutely dead things, but do 
contain a potency of life in them to be as active 
as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, 
they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy 
and extraction of that living intellect that bred 
them. I know they are as lively, and as vigor- 
ously productive, as those fabulous dragons' 
teeth ; and being sown up and down, may chance 
to spring up armed men. 

"And yet on the other hand, unless wariness 
be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good 
book ; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, 
God's image; but he who destroys a good book 
kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it 
were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to 
the earth; but a good book is the precious life- 
blood of a master-spirit; embalmed and treas- 
ured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 

" 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof, 
40 



The Glory of English Prose 

perhaps, there is no great loss; and revolutions 
of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected 
truth, for the want of which whole nations fare 
the worse. 

"We should be wary, therefore, what perse- 
cutions we raise against the living labours of 
public men; how we spill that seasoned life of 
man preserved and stored up in books ; since we 
see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, 
sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it extend to the 
whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof 
the execution ends not in the slaying of an ele- 
mental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth 
essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an 
immortality rather than a life." 

This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a 
good and proper book. 

A bad book will generally die of itself, but 
there is something horribly malignant about a 
wicked book, as it must always be worse than a 
wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book 
cannot. 

It is the men of letters who keep alive the 
41 



Letters to my Grandson 

books of the great from generation to gener- 
ation, and they are never likely to preserve a 
wicked book from oblivion. Ultimately such 
go to light fires and encompass groceries. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



42 



8 

My dear Antony, 

Milton, of whom I wrote in my last letter, 
was five years older than Jeremy Taylor, of 
whom I am going to write to-day. The 
latter's writings differ very much from Mil- 
ton's, although they were contemporaries 
for the whole of the former's life. 

From the grave and august periods of 
Milton to the sweet beauty of Jeremy Taylor is 
as the passing from out the austere halls of 
Justice to lovely fields full of flowers. 

Your and my great kinsman, Coleridge, pro- 
nounced Jeremy Taylor to be the most eloquent 
of all divines ; and Coleridge was a great critic. 

Indeed, there seems to dwell permanently in 
Jeremy Taylor's mind a compelling sweetness 
and serenity. 

His parables, though sometimes perhaps 
43 



Letters to my Grandson 

almost of set purpose fanciful, are always full 
of beauty. 

How can anyone withhold sympathy and 
affection from the writer of such a passage as 
this : — 

"But as, when the sun approaches towards 
the gates of the morning, he first opens a little 
eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of 
darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up 
the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the 
fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern 
hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those 
which decked the brows of Moses when he was 
forced to wear a veil because himself had seen 
the face of God ; and still, while a man tells the 
story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair 
face and a full light, and then he shines one whole 
day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping 
great and little showers, and sets quickly, so is a 
man's reason and his life. " 

Again : — 

"No man can tell but he that loves his child- 
ren, how many delicious accents make a man's 
44 



The Glory of English Prose 

heart dance in the pretty conversation of those 
dear pledges; their childishness, their stammer- 
ing, their little angers, their innocence, their 
imperfections, their necessities, are so many 
little emanations of joy and comfort to him that 
delights in their persons and society ; but he that 
loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness 
at home, and broods a nest of sorrows; and 
blessing itself cannot make him happy; so that 
all the commandments of God enjoining a man 
to ' love his wife ' are nothing but so many neces- 
sities and capacities of joy. ' She that is loved, 
is safe; and he that loves, is joyful.' Love is a 
union of all things excellent; it contains in it 
proportion and satisfaction, and rest and confi- 
dence. " 

Again : — 

"So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of 
grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, 
and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the 
clouds ; but the poor bird was beaten back with 
the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his 
motion made irregular and inconstant, descend- 
45 



Letters to my Grandson 

ing more at every breath of the tempest, than it 
could recover by the Hberation and frequent 
weighing of his wings ; till the little creature was 
forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the 
storm was over ; and then it made a prosperous 
flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned 
music and motion from an angel, as he passed 
sometimes through the air, about his ministries 
here below; so is the prayer of a good man, " 

Again : — 

' ' I am fallen into the hands of publicans and 
sequestrators, and they have taken all from me ; 
what now? Let me look about me. They have 
left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a 
loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and 
some to relieve me, and I can still discourse ; and 
unless I list, they have not taken away my merry 
countenance and my cheerful spirit, and a good 
conscience ; they still have left me the Providence 
of God, and all the promises of the Gospel, and 
my reHgion, and my hopes of heaven, and my 
charity to them too; and still I sleep and digest, 
I eat and drink, I read and meditate ; I can walk 
46 



The Glory of English Prose 

in my neighbour's pleasant fields, and see the 
varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all 
that in which God delights, that is, in virtue and 
wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God Him- 
self." 

Here, Antony, is true wisdom. True, in- 
deed, is it that no one can take away from you 
your merry countenance, your cheerful spirit, 
and your good conscience unless you choose; 
keep all three, Antony, throughout your life, 
and you will be happy yourself and make 
everyone about you happy, and that is to 
make a little heaven of your earthly home. 

Yoiu* loving old 

G. P. 



47 



My dear Antony, 

Some day, no doubt, you will read some of 
the celebrated diaries that have come down to 
us. The best known of such books is Pepys's 
Diary which was written in a kind of short- 
hand, and so lay undeciphered from his death 
in 1703 for more than a century. One of its 
merits is its absolute self -revelation ; for Pepys 
exposes to us his character without a shadow 
of reserve in all its vanity ; and the other is the 
faithful picture it gives us of the time of the 
Restoration. 

But, though less popular, Evelyn's Diary is, 
I think, in many ways superior to that of 
Pepys. ' 

There is a quiet, unostentatious dignity 
about Evelyn which is altogether absent in 

' Another diary that you should read by and by is that of 
Henry_Grabb Robinson. 

Qy 48 



The Glory of English Prose 

the garrulous Pepys, and, indeed I find some- 
thing very beautiful and touching in the grief 
Evelyn pours forth upon the death of his little 
son of five years old : — 

"The day before he died, " writes Evelyn, "he 
call'd to me and in a more serious manner than 
usual, told me that for all I loved him so dearly 
I should give my house, land, and all my fine 
things, to his Brother Jack, he should have none 
of them ; and next morning when he found him- 
self ill, and that I persuaded him to keepe his 
hands in bed, he demanded whether he might 
pray to God with his hands un-joyn'd; and a 
little after, whilst in great agonie, whether he 
should not offend God by using His holy name 
so often calling for ease. What shall I say of 
his frequent pathetical ejaculations utter'd of 
himselfe: Sweete Jesus save me, deliver me, 
pardon my sinns, let Thine angels receive me! 

"So early knowledge, so much piety and per- 
fection! But thus God having dress'd up a 
Saint for himselfe, would not longer permit him 
with us, unworthy of ye future fruites of this in- 
comparable hopefuU blossome. Such a child I 

4 49 



Letters to my Grandson 

never saw : for such a child I blesse God in whose 
bosome he is ! May I and mine become as this 
little child, who now follows the child Jesus that 
Lamb of God in a white robe whithersoever he 
goes ; even so, Lord Jesus, fiat voluntas tua! Thou 
gavest him to us. Thou hast taken him from us, 
blessed be ye name of ye Lord! That I had 
anything acceptable to Thee was from Thy 
grace alone, since from me he had nothing but 
sin, but that Thou hast pardon'd! Blessed be 
my God for ever. Amen ! I caused his body to 
be coffin'd in lead, and reposited on the 30th at 
8 o'clock that night in the church at Deptford, 
accompanied with divers of my relations and 
neighbours among whom I distributed rings 
with this motto: Dominus ahstulit; intending, 
God willing, to have him transported with my 
owne body to be interr'd in our dormitory in 
Wotton Church, in my dear native county of 
Surrey, and to lay my bones and mingle my 
dust with my fathers, if God be gracious to me 
and make me fit for Him as this blessed child 
was. The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all my 
other afflictions, Amen ! 
50 



The Glory of English Prose 

' ' Here ends the joy of my life, and for which 
I go even mourning to my grave. " 

This great love and reverence for little 
children is peculiarly in accord with Christian- 
ity, for we should remember that it was the 
WISE men, who, when they had journeyed far 
across the world to salute the King of kings, 
laid their offerings down at the feet of a little 
child. 

Is there not something to reverence in faith 
and resignation such as are here expressed by 
Evelyn? Were not these men of old with 
their unshakable faith and simple piety better 
and happier than those who in these days know 
so much more and believe so much less? 

We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but 
perhaps they had the wisdom. 

I think, Antony, that in the history of 
England we shall have difficulty in finding any 
of our greatest men whose hearts and minds 
were not filled with a reverence for God and a 
faith in something beyond the blind forces 

51 



Letters to my Grandson 

which are all that Science has to offer mankind 
as a guide of life. 

All who have acted most nobly from the 
days of Ralegh and Sir Thomas More, down 
to the days of Gordon of Khartoimi, and down 
again to onr own days when the youth of 
England upheld the invincible valour, self- 
sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest 
of all wars, — all have been filled with the love 
of God and have found therein a perfect seren- 
ity in the face of death, and that peace which 
passeth all understanding. 

The character of our race rests indubitably 
upon that faith, and he who lifts his voice, or 
directs his pen, to tear it down, had better 
never have been born. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



52 



10 

My dear Antony, 

In these letters I am never going to quote to 
you anything that does not seem to me to rise 
to a level of merit well above ordinary proper 
prose. There are many writers whose general 
correctness and excellence is not to be ques- 
tioned or denied whom I shall not select in 
these letters for your particular admiration. 

By and by, when your own love of literature 
impels you to excursions in all directions, you 
may perhaps come to differ from my judgment, 
for everyone's taste must vary a little from 
that of others. 

English prose in its excellence follows the 
proportions manifested by the contours of the 
elevation of the world's land. 

Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of 
such are the interminable outpourings of 

53 



Letters to my Grandson 

newspapers and novels and school books. 
And, as each ascent from the sea-level is 
reached, less and less land attains to it, and 
when the snow-line is approached only a very 
small proportion indeed of the land aspires so 
high. 

So among writers, those who climb to the 
snow-line are a slender band compared to all 
the inhabitants of the lower slopes and plains. 

In these letters I do not intend to mistake 
a pedlar for a mountaineer, nor a hearthstone 
for a granite peak. Time slowly buries deep 
in oblivion the writings of the industrious and 
the dull. 

Bom fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, 
of whom I wrote in a former letter, John Bun- 
yan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the 
persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and 
was cast into Bedford gaol, where he lay for 
conscience' sake for twelve years. "As I 
walked through the wilderness of this world," 
said he, "I lighted on a certain place where 
was a den, and laid me down in that place to 

54 



The Glory of English Prose 

sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a dream " ; and 
the dream which he dreamed has passed into 
all lands, and has been translated into all 
languages, and has taken its place with the 
Bible and with the Imitation of Christ as a 
guide of life. 

The force of simplicity finds here its most 
complete expression ; the story wells from the 
man's heart, whence come all great things : — 

"Then said the Interpreter to Christian, 
'Hast thou considered all these things?' 

''Christian. 'Yes, and they put me in hope 
and fear. ' 

''Interpreter. 'Well, keep all things so in thy 
mind that they may be as a goad in thy sides, to 
prick thee forward in the way thou must go. ' 

"Then Christian began to gird up his loins, 
and to address himself to his journey. 

"Then said the Interpreter, 'The Comforter 
be always with thee, good Christian, to guide 
thee in the way that leads to the city. ' 

"So Christian went on his way. 

"Now I saw in my dream that the highway 
55 



Letters to my Grandson 

up which Christian had to go was fenced on 
either side with a wall, and that wall was called 
Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did bur- 
dened Christian run, but not without great 
difficulty, because of the load on his back. He 
ran thus till he came at a place somewhat 
ascending, and upon that place stood a cross, 
and a little below in the bottom a sepulchre. 

"So I saw in my dream that just as Christian 
came up with the cross, his burden loosed from 
off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and 
began to tumble, and so continued to do till it 
came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell 
in, and I saw it no more. 

"Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and 
said with a merry heart, ' He hath given me rest 
by His sorrow, and life by His death. ' 

"Then he stood awhile to look and wonder, 
for it was very surprising to him that the sight 
of the cross should thus ease him of his burden. 

' ' He looked, therefore, and looked again, even 
till the springs that were in his head sent the 
waters down his cheeks. " 

Bunyan died in 1688, and Dr. Johnson was 
56 



The Glory of English Prose 

born in 1709. Many years, therefore, elapsed 
between the time when they each displayed 
their greatest powers. 

The interval was occupied by many 
reputable worldly-wise writers, but I do not 
myself find, between these two masters of 
English prose, anyone who wrote passages of 
such great lustre that I can quote them for 
your admiration. 

You will have noticed, Antony, that all the 
writers whom I have quoted, and who reached 
the true nobility of speech necessary to com- 
mand our tribute of unstinted praise, have 
been men of manifest piety and reverence. 
And you will find it difficult to discover really 
great and eloquent prose from the pen of any 
man whose heart is not filled with a simple 
faith in the goodness of God. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



57 



II 

My dear Antony, 

I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is 
almost a test of a true man of letters that he 
should love him. 

He was rugged and prejudiced, but mag- 
nanimous; impatient with the presimiptuous, 
tender to modest ignorance, proudly independ- 
ent of the patronage of the great, and was 
often doing deeds of noble self-sacrifice by 
stealth. 

Through long years of hard, unremitting toil 
for his daily bread he lived bravely and 
sturdily, with no extraneous help but his stout' 
oak stick — an unconquerable man. 

His prose rises on occasion to a measured 
and stately grandeiu" above the reach of any 
of his contemporaries. 

It was not often that he unveiled to the 
58 



The Glory of English Prose 

public gaze the beatings of his own noble 
heart, or invited the world to contemplate the 
depression and suffering amid which his un- 
ending labours were accomplished. 

The concluding page of the preface to the 
first edition of the great Dictionary is, there- 
fore, the more precious and moving. I know 
not why this majestic utterance came to be 
deleted in later editions ; certainly it sanctifies, 
and as it were crowns with a crown of sorrow, 
the greatest work of his life ; and with reverent 
sympathy and unstinted admiration I repro- 
duce it here : — 

"Life may be lengthened by care, though 
death cannot ultimately be defeated : tongues, 
like governments, have a natural tendency to 
degeneration : we have long preserved our con- 
stitution, let us make some struggles for our 
language. 

' ' In hope of giving longevity to that which its 
own nature forbids to be immortal, I have de- 
voted this book, the labour of years, to the hon- 
our of my country, that we may no longer yield 
59 



Letters to my Grandson 

the palm of philology to the nations of the con- 
tinent. The chief glory of every people arises 
from its authors; whether I shall add anything 
by my own writings to the reputation of English 
literature, must be left to time : much of my life 
has been lost under the pressure of disease ; much 
has been trifled away; and much has always 
been spent in provision for the day that was 
passing over me; but I shall not think my em- 
ployment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance 
foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to 
the propagators of knowledge, and understand 
the teachers of truth ; if my labours afford light 
to the repositories of science, and add celebrity 
to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle, 
"When I am animated by this wish, I look 
with pleasure on my book, however defective, 
and deliver it to the world with the spirit of a 
man that has endeavoured well. That it will 
immediately become popular I have not pro- 
mised to myself : a few wild blunders and risible 
absurdities, from which no work of such multi- 
plicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly 
with laughter, and harden ignorance in con- 
60 



The Glory of English Prose 

tempt ', but useful diligence will at last prevail, 
and there never can be wanting some, who dis- 
tinguish desert, who will consider that no dic- 
tionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, 
since while it is hastening to publication, some 
words are budding, and some falling away ; that 
a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and 
etymology, and that even a whole life would not 
be sufficient; that he whose design includes 
whatever language can express must often speak 
of what he does not understand; that a writer 
will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the 
end, and sometimes faint with weariness under 
a task which Scaliger compares to the labours 
of the anvil and the mine ; that what is obvious 
is not always known, and what is known is not 
always present ; that sudden fits of inadvertency 
will surprise vigilance, slight avocations will 
seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the mind 
will darken learning; and that the writer shall 
often in vain trace his memory at the moment 
of need for that which yesterday he knew with 
intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled 
into his thoughts to-morrow. 
6i 



Letters to my Grandson 

"In this work, when it shall be found that 
much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that 
much likewise is performed ; and though no book 
was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, 
and the world is little solicitous to know whence 
proceeded the faults of that which it condemns, 
yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it that the 
English Dictionary was written with little assist- 
ance of the learned, and without any patronage 
of the great ; not in the soft obscurities of retire- 
ment, or under the shelter of academic bowers, 
but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in 
sickness and in sorrow; and it may repress the 
triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that 
if our language is not here fully displayed, I have 
only failed in an attempt which no human 
powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons 
of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed and 
comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the 
toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive ; 
if the aggregated knowledge and co-operating 
diligence of the Italian academicians did not 
secure them from the censure of Beni; if the 
embodied critics of France, when fifty years had 
62 



The Glory of English Prose 

been spent upon their work, were obliged to 
change its economy, and give their second 
editions another form, I may surely be contented 
without the praise of perfection which, if I could 
obtain, in this gloom of solitude what would it 
avail me? 

"I have protracted my work till most of those 
whom I wished to please have sunk into the 
grave, and success and miscarriage are empty 
sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tran- 
quillity, having little to fear or hope from cen- 
sure or from praise. " 

This seems to me to be the noblest passage 
that Johnson ever wrote. 

Almost all the most magnificent utterances 
of man are tinged with sadness. In this they 
possess a quality that is almost inseparable 
from grandeur wherever displayed. No man 
of sensibility and taste feels it possible to make 
jokes himself, or to tolerate them from others 
when in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, 
or a tempest at sea, or when he views from a 
peak in the Andes — as I have done — the sun 

63 



Letters to my Grandson 

descend into the Pacific. The greatest pic- 
tures painted by man touch the heart rather 
than elate it; and genius finds its highest 
expression not in comedy, but in tragedy. 

And this need cause us no surprise when we 
consider how much of the great work in letters 
and in art is directly due to the writer possess- 
ing in full measure the gift of S5rmpathy. 

People with this gift, even if they are with- 
out the faculty of expression, are beloved by 
those about them, which must bring them 
happiness. 

Till he was over fifty Dr. Johnson's life was 
a weary struggle with poverty. He wrote 
Rasselas under the pressure of an urgent need 
of money to send to his dying mother. His 
wife died some few years earlier. I have 
always thought that the sad reflections he put 
into the mouth of an old philosopher towards 
the end of the story were indeed the true 
expressions of his own tired heart : — 

"Praise," said the sage with a sigh, "is to 

an old man an empty sound. I have neither 
64 



The Glory of English Prose 

mother to be delighted with the reputation of 
her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her 
husband. 

"I have outhved my friends and my rivals. 
Nothing is now of much importance ; for I cannot 
extend my interest beyond myself. Youth is 
delighted with applause, because it is considered 
as the earnest of some future good, and because 
the prospect of life is far extended; but to me, 
who am now declining to decrepitude, there is 
little to be feared from the malevolence of men, 
and yet less to be hoped from their affection or 
esteem. Something they may take away, but 
they can give me nothing. Riches would now 
be useless, and high employment would be pain. 
My retrospect of life recalls to my view many 
opportunities of good neglected, much time 
squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idle- 
ness and vacancy. I leave many great de- 
signs unattempted, and many great attempts 
unfinished. 

My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, 
and therefore I compose myself to tranquillity; 
endeavour to abstract my thoughts from hopes 
s 65 



Letters to my Grandson 

and cares, which, though reason knows them to 
be vain, still try to keep their old possession of 
the heart; expect, with serene humility, that 
hour which nature cannot long delay ; and hope 
to possess, in a better state, that happiness which 
here I could not find, and that virtue which here 
I have not attained. " 

From the results of Rasselas he sent his 
mother money, but she had expired before it 
reached her. 

Down to the time of Dr. Johnson it was the 
custom for writers of books and poems to seek 
and enjoy the patronage of some great noble- 
man, to whom they generally dedicated their 
works. 

And in pursuance of that custom Dr. John- 
son, when he first issued the plan or prospectus 
of his great Dictionary in 1747, addressed it to 
Lord Chesterfield, who was regarded as the 
most brilliant and cultivated nobleman of his 
time. Lord Chesterfield, however, took no 
notice of the matter till the Dictionary was on 
the point of coming out in 1755, and then 

66 



The Glory of English Prose 

wrote some flippant remarks about it in a 
publication called The World. 

At this Dr. Johnson wrote a letter to the 
condescending peer, which became celebrated 
throughout England and practically put an 
end to writers seeking the patronage of the 
great. 

This wonderful letter concludes thus : — 

' ' Seven years, my lord, have now passed since 
I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed 
from your door; during which time I have been 
pushing on my work through difficulties, of 
which it is useless to complain, and have brought 
it, at last, to the verge of publication, without 
one act of assistance, one word of encourage- 
ment, or one smile of favour. Such treatment 
I did not expect, for I never had a patron before, 

"The shepherd in Virgil grew at last ac- 
quainted with Love, and found him a native of 
the rocks. 

*Ts not a patron, my lord, one who looks with 
unconcern on a man struggling for life in the 
water, and, when he has reached ground, encum- 
67 



Letters to my Grandson 

bers him with help ? The notice which you have 
been pleased to take of my labours, had it been 
early, had been kind, but it has been delayed till 
I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am 
solitary, and cannot impart it; till T am known, 
and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical 
asperity not to confess obligations where no 
benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that 
the public should consider me as owing that to a 
patron which Providence has enabled me to do 
for myself. 

' ' Having carried on my work thus far with so 
little obligation to any favourer of learning, I 
shall not be disappointed though I should con- 
clude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have 
been wakened from that dream of hope, in which 
I once boasted myself with so much exultation, 
my lord,^ — your lordship's most humble, most 
obedient servant. Sam. Johnson." 

Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson when you come 
to read it, as you will be sure to do by and by, 
has left a living picture of this great and good 
man for all future generations to enjoy, ex- 

68 



The Glory of English Prose 

tenuating nothing of his quaintness, direct- 
ness, and proneness to contradiction for its 
own sake, yet imveihng everywhere the deep 
piety and fine magnanimity of his character. 
He suffered much, but never complained, 
and certainly must be numbered among the 
great men of letters who have found true 
consolation and support in every circumstance 
of life in an earnest and fervent faith. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



69 



12 

My dear Antony, 

Edmund Burke was bom in 1730, and there- 
fore was twenty-one years younger than Dr. 
Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years. 
He was a great prose writer, and although 
some of his speeches in ParHament that have 
come down to us possess every quahty of solid 
argument and lofty eloquence, there must 
have been something lacking in his delivery 
and voice, for he so frequently failed to rivet 
the attention of the House, and so often 
addressed a steadily dwindling audience, that 
the wits christened him "the dinner bell." 

All men of letters, however, acknowledge 
Btirke as a true master of a very great 
style. 

We see in him the first signs of a breaking 
away from the universal restraint of the older 

70 



The Glory of English Prose 

writers, and of the surging up of expressed 
emotion. 

His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette 
and his panegyric of the lost age of chivalry- 
are familiar to all students of English prose. 
"It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years 
since I saw the Queen of France, then the 
Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never 
lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to 
touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just 
above the horizon, decorating and cheering the 
elevated sphere she just began to move in — 
glittering like the morning star, full of life, and 
splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! 
and what a heart must I have, to contemplate 
without emotion that elevation and that fall! 
Little did I dream when she added titles of ven- 
eration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respect- 
ful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry 
the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in 
that bosom ; little did I dream that I should have 
lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a 
nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of 
honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thou- 
71 



Letters to my Grandson 

sand swords must have leaped from their scab- 
bards to avenge even a look that threatened her 
with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone. 
That of sophisters, economists, and calculators 
has succeeded ; and the glory of Europe is extin- 
guished for ever. 

"Never, never more, shall we behold that 
generous loyalty to sex and rank, that proud 
submission, that dignified obedience, that sub- 
ordination of the heart, which kept alive, even 
in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted free- 
dom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap 
defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment 
and heroic enterprise is gone ! 

"It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that 
chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a 
wound; which inspired courage while it miti- 
gated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it 
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its 
evil, by losing all its grossness. " 

This is a splendid and world-famous passage 
well worth committing to memory. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 
72 



13 

My dear Antony, 

Edward Gibbon, who wrote the Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire, belonged to the 
later half of the eighteenth century, and was a 
contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He 
finished his great history three years after 
Dr. Johnson's death. It is a monumental 
work, and will live as long as the English 
language. It is one of the books which every 
cultivated gentleman should read. The style 
is stately and sonorous, and the industry and 
erudition involved in its production must have 
been immense. 

Although it never sinks below a noble 
elevation of style, it nevertheless displays no 
uplifting flights of eloquence or declamation, 
and to me, and probably to you, Antony, the 
most moving passages in Gibbon's writings are 

73 



Letters to my Grandson 

those that describe with unaffected emotion 
the moment of the first resolve to compose the 
great history and the night when he wrote the 
last line of it. On page 129 of his memoirs' 
he wrote : — 

* ' It was at Rome on the 1 5th of October, 1 764, 
as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, 
while the bare-footed f ryars were singing vespers 
in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing 
the decline and fall of the city first started to 
my mind." 

Thus did he resolve to devote himself to the 
tremendous task, and at Lausanne twenty- 
three years later it was at last fulfilled. He 
recorded the event in a few pregnant sentences 
that are strangely memorable : — 

* ' It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th 
of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and 
twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last 
page, in a summer-house in my garden. After 

' First edition, 1794. 

74 



The Glory of English Prose 

laying down my pen I took several turns in a 
berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which com- 
mands a prospect of the country, the lake, and 
the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky 
was serene, the silver orb of the moon was re- 
flected from the waters, and all nature was silent. 
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on 
the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the 
establishment of my fame. But my pride was 
soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was 
spread over my mind, by the idea that I had 
taken an everlasting leave of an old and agree- 
able companion, and that, whatsoever might be 
the future fate of my History, the life of the 
historian must be short and precarious. " 

In June, 1888, just one hundred and one 
years after that pen had been finally laid aside, 
I searched in Lausanne for the sirnimer-house 
and covered walk, and could find no very au- 
thentic record of its site. I brought home a 
flower from the garden where it seemed prob- 
able the Slimmer-house had once existed, 
behind the modern hotel built there in the 

75 



Letters to my Grandson 

intervening time, and laid it between the 
leaves of my Gibbon. 

The pressed flower was still there when I 
last took the book down from my shelves. 

I hope my successors will preserve the little 
token of my reverence. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



76 



14 

My dear Antony, 

Some of the most eloquent orators in the 
world have been Irishmen, and among them 
Henry Grattan was supreme. 

The Irish Parliament in the later half of the 
eighteenth century frequently sat spell-bound 
under the magic of his voice. 

In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he 
achieved by his amazing eloquence a great 
National Revolution in Ireland. But eight- 
een years later all that he had fought for 
and achieved was lost in the Act of Union. In 
these days I suppose few will be found to de- 
fend the means whereby that Act was passed ; 
but the public assertions that the people of 
Ireland were in favour of it wrung from 
Grattan the following cry of indignation and 
wrath : — 

77 



Letters to my Grandson 

"To affirm that the judgment of a nation is 
erroneous may mortify, but to affirm that her 
judgment against is for; to assert that she has 
said ay when she has pronounced no; to affect to 
refer a great question to the people ; finding the 
sense of the people, like that of the parliament, 
against the question, to force the question; to 
affirm the sense of the people to be for the ques- 
tion ; to affirm that the question is persisted in, 
because the sense of the people is for it ; to make 
the falsification of the country's sentiments the 
foundation of her ruin, and the ground of the 
Union ; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, 
liberty, honour, property, are taken away by her 
own authority, — there is, in such artifice, an 
effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility, that 
can best be answered by sensations of astonish- 
ment and disgust, excited on this occasion by the 
British minister, whether he speaks in gross and 
total ignorance of the truth, or in shameless and 
supreme contempt for it. 

"The constitution may be for a time so lost; 
the character of the country cannot be so lost. 
The ministers of the Crown will, or may, per- 
78 



The Glory of English Prose 

haps, at length find that it is not so easy to put 
down for ever an ancient and respectable nation, 
by abilities, however great, and by power and 
by corruption, however irresistible ; liberty may 
repair her golden beams, and with redoubled 
heat animate the country ; the cry of loyalty will 
not long continue against the principles of lib- 
erty; loyalty is a noble, a judicious, and a capa- 
cious principle; but in these countries loyalty, 
distinct from liberty, is corruption, not loyalty. 

"The cry of the connexion will not, in the 
end, avail against the principles of liberty. 
Connexion is a wise and a profound policy ; but 
connexion without an Irish Parliament is con- 
nexion without its own principle, without 
analogy of condition; without the pride of 
honour that should attend it; is innovation, is 
peril, is subjugation — not connexion. 

"The cry of the connexion will not, in the 
end, avail against the principle of liberty. 

' ' Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, 

necessary for the preservation of freedom, nec- 

ecessary for that of empire; but, without union 

of hearts — with a separate government, and 

79 



Letters to my Grandson 

without a separate parliament, identification is 
extinction, is dishonour, is conquest — not identi- 
fication. 

* ' Yet I do not give up the country — I see her 
in a swoon, but she is not dead — though in her 
tomb she Hes helpless and motionless, still there 
is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a 
glow of beauty — 

"Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet 
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks, 
And death's pale flag is not advanced there." 

"While a plank of the vessel sticks together, 
I will not leave her. Let the courtier present 
his flimsy sail, and carry the light bark of his 
faith, with every new breath of wind — I will 
remain anchored here — with fidelity to the 
fortunes of my country, faithful to her freedom, 
faithful to her fall. " 

Of another character, but not less admirable 
than his eloquence in the Senate, was Grat- 
tan's achievement with the pen. His descrip- 
tion of the great Lord Chatham lives as one 

80 



The Glory of English Prose 

of the most noble panegyrics — if not the most 
noble — in the world. No writer, before or 
since, has offered anyone such splendid hom- 
age as this — that he never sunk "to the vulgar 
level of the great." 

"The Secretary stood alone. Modern degen- 
eracy had not reached him. Original and unac- 
commodating, the features of his character had 
the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind 
overawed majesty, and one of his sovereigns 
thought royalty so impaired in his presence that 
he conspired to remove him, in order to be 
relieved from his superiority. No state chi- 
canery, no narrow systems of vicious politics, no 
idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to 
the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, 
persuasive, and impracticable, his object was 
England, — his ambition was fame; without 
dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupt- 
ing, he made a venal age unanimous; France 
sunk beneath him ; with one hand he smote the 
House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the 
democracy of England. The sight of his mind 



Letters to my Grandson 

was infinite, and his schemes were to affect, not 
England, not the present age only, but Europe 
and posterity. Wonderful were the means by 
which these schemes were accomplished, always 
seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of 
an understanding animated by ardour, and 
enlightened by prophecy. 

"The ordinary feelings which make life ami- 
able and indolent — those sensations which 
soften, and allure, and vulgarise — were unknown 
to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic 
weakness reached him ; but, aloof from the sordid 
occurrences of life, and unsullied by its inter- 
couiTse, he came occasionally into our system to 
counsel and decide. 

"A character so exalted, so strenuous, so vari- 
ous, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, 
and the Treasury trembled at the name of Pitt 
through all her classes of venality. Corruption im- 
agined, indeed, that she had found defects in this 
statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency 
of his glory, and much of the ruin of his victories 
— but the history of his country, and the calami- 
ties of the enemy, answered and refuted her. 
82 



The Glory of English Prose 

*'Nor were his political abilities his only 
talents; his eloquence was an era in the senate, 
peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing 
gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom — 
not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the 
splendid conflagration of TuUy; it resembled 
sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the 
music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not 
conduct the understanding through the painful 
subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like 
Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but 
rather lightened upon the subject, and reached 
the point by the flashings of his mind, which, 
like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be 
followed. 

"Yet he was not always correct or polished; 
on the contrary, he was sometimes ungrammati- 
cal, negligent, and unenforcing, for he concealed 
his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. 
Upon many occasions he abated the vigour of his 
eloquence, but even then, like the spinning of a 
cannon ball, he was still alive with fatal, un- 
approachable activity. 

"Upon the whole, there was in this man 
83 



Letters to my Grandson 

something that could create, subvert, or reform; 
an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence to 
summon mankind to society, or to break the 
bonds of slavery asunder, and rule the wildness 
of free minds with unbounded authority ; some- 
thing that could establish or overwhelm empire, 
and strike a blow in the world that should 
resound through its history. " 

Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years 
later, in 1844, another great English writer, 
Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage 
upon the great Lord Chatham in the 
Edinburgh Review: — 

"Chatham sleeps near the northern door of 
the church, in a spot which has ever since been 
appropriated to statesmen, as the other end of 
the same transept has long been to poets. Mans- 
field rests there, and the second William Pitt, 
and Fox, and Grattan, and Canning, and Wilber- 
force. In no other cemetery do so many great 
citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over 
those venerable graves towers the stately monu- 
ment of Chatham, and, from above, his effigy, 
84 



The Glory of English Prose 

graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle 
face and outstretched arm, to bid England be of 
good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes. 

"The generation which reared that memorial 
of him has disappeared. The time has come 
when the rash and indiscriminate judgments 
which his contemporaries passed on his character 
may be calmly revised by history. And history, 
while, for the warning of vehement, high, and 
daring natures, she notes his many errors, will 
yet deliberately pronounce that, among the 
eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely 
one has left a more stainless and none a more 
splendid name." 

It is a great race, Antony, that can produce 
a man of such a character as Chatham, and 
also writers who can dedicate to him such 
superb tributes as these. 

Macaulay's prose has been much criticised 
as being too near to easy journalism to be 
classed among the great classic passages of 
English ; but this much must be recognised to 
his great credit — he never wrote an obscure 

85 



Letters to my Grandson 

sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his 
works may be searched in vain for a foreign 
idiom or even a foreign word. He possessed 
an infaUible memory, absolute perspicuity, 
and a scholarly taste. He detested oppression 
wherever enforced, and never exercised his 
great powers in the defence of mean politics 
or unworthy practices. 

Such a writer to-day would blow a whole- 
some wind across the tainted pools of political 
intrigue. 

We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, 
clean writer, who was an honour to letters. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



86 



15 

My dear Antony, 

Born in the same year as was Grattan, 
namely, in 1750, Lord Erskine adorned the 
profession of the Bar with an eloquence that 
never exhibited the slight tendency to be 
ponderous which sometimes was displayed by 
his contemporaries. 

Grace and refinement shine out in every one 
of his great speeches. 

He was a young scion of the great house of 
Buchan, being the third son of the tenth Earl. 
After being in the Navy for four years he left 
it for the Army, and six years later he went to 
Trinity College, Cambridge, and took his 
degree ; thence he came to the Bar in 1778, and 
at once displayed the most conspicuous ability 
as an advocate. 

He appeared for Home Tooke in a six-day 
87 



Letters to my Grandson 

trial for high treason, which ended in an 
acquittal. 

In 1 806 he became Lord Chancellor and a 
peer. 

I quote an indignant warning to the aristo- 
cracy of England which flamed forth in one 
of his great speeches: — 

"Let the aristocracy of England, which 
trembles so much for itself, take heed to its own 
security ; let the nobles of England, if they mean 
to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some 
shape or other, must exist in every social com- 
munity, take care to support it by aiming at 
that which is creative, and alone creative, of 
real superiority. Instead of matching them- 
selves to supply wealth, to be again idly squan- 
dered in debauching excesses, or to round the 
quarters of a family shield ; instead of continuing 
their names and honours in cold and alienated 
embraces, amidst the enervating rounds of 
shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers 
of old lived before them; let them marry as 
affection and prudence lead the way, and, in the 
88 



The Glory of English Prose 

ardours of mutual love, and in the simplicities 
of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a 
vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and 
moral from early habits; and, instead of wasting 
their fortunes and their strength in the tasteless 
circles of debauchery, let them light up their 
magnificent and hospital halls to the gentry and 
peasantry of the country, extending the consola- 
tions of wealth and influence to the poor. Let 
them but do this , — and instead of those dangerous 
and distracted divisions between the different 
ranks of life, and those jealousies of the multi- 
tude so often blindly painted as big with de- 
struction, we should see our country as one large 
and harmonious family, which can never be 
accomplished amidst vice and corruption, by 
wars and treaties, by informations, ex officio for 
libels, or by any of the tricks and artifices of the 
State." 

Mr. Erskine was entitled, as the son of the 
tenth Earl of Buchan, to speak such words 
of warning and exhortation to the aristocracy 
of England to which he belonged, and the lapse 

89 



Letters to my Grandson 

of a century and a quarter has not rendered 
the exhortation vain, though it may be hoped 
that the condemnatory clauses of the speech 
would not at the present time be so well 
justified as when they were delivered. 

Great names carry great obligations, and, 
for the most part, those who bear them to-day 
recognise those great obligations and en- 
deavour without ostentation to fulfil them. 

The silly fribbles who posture before the 
photographic cameras for penny newspapers 
do not represent the real aristocracy of 
England. 

We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo 
for an eagle. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



90 



i6 

My dear Antony, 

I shall not expect you in your reading often 
to penetrate into the innumerable dusty octa- 
vos that contain sermons. The stoutest heart 
may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed 
pedestrianism of these platitudinous volumes. 
But there does occasionally arise above the 
dull horizon a star whose brilliance is the more 
conspicuous for the surrounding gloom. 

In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter' to a Mr. 
Flower, who was a publisher at Cambridge, 
wrote : — 

* * I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle ? 
I mean towards the public. We want such men 
to rescue this enlightened age from general irre- 
ligion." 

' Now in my library. — S. C. 

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Letters to my Grandson 

I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to 
but few in these days, but at the end of the 
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth 
centuries his fame was great and deserved. 

As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired 
eloquence, Coleridge estimated his powers as 
second only to those of Jeremy Taylor. When 
Napoleon was at the supreme height of his 
conquests, and England alone of European 
countries still stood erect, uninvaded and 
undismayed, a company of soldiers attended 
Robert Hall's place of worship on the eve of 
their departure to Spain. The occasion was 
memorable and moving, and the preacher's 
splendid periods deserve to be preserved from 
oblivion : — 

"By a series of criminal enterprises, by the 
successes of guilty ambition, the liberties of 
Europe have been gradually extinguished; the 
subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the 
free towns of Germany, has completed that 
catastrophe; and we are the only people in the 
Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of 
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The Glory of English Prose 

equal laws and a free constitution. Freedom, 
driven from every spot on the Continent, has 
sought an asylum in a country which she always 
chose for her favorite abode; but she is pursued 
even here, and threatened with destruction. 
The inundations of lawless power, after covering 
the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and 
we are most exactly, most critically placed in the 
only aperture where it can be successfully 
repelled, in the Thermopylae of the universe. 

"As far as the interests of freedom are con- 
cerned, the most important by far of sublunary 
interests, you, my countrymen, stand in the 
capacity of the federal representatives of the 
human race; for with you it is to determine 
(under God) in what condition the latest poster- 
ity shall be born ; their fortunes are entrusted to 
your care, and on your conduct at this moment 
depends the colour and complexion of their des- 
tiny. If liberty, after being extinguished on the 
Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence is 
it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night 
that will invest it ? 

' ' It remains with you, then, to decide whether 
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that freedom, at whose voice the kingdoms of 
Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to run a 
career of virtuous emulation in everything great 
and good ; the freedom which dispelled the mists 
of superstition and invited the nations to behold 
their God; whose magic touch kindled the rays 
of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the 
flame of eloquence; the freedom which poured 
into our lap opulence and arts, and embellished 
life with innumerable institutions and improve- 
ments till it became a theatre of wonders; it is 
for you to decide whether this freedom shall yet 
sun^ive, or be covered with a funeral pall, and 
wrapt in eternal gloom. 

" It is not necessary to await your determina- 
tion. In the solicitude you feel to approve 
yourselves worthy of such a trust, every thought 
of what is afflicting in warfare, every apprehen- 
sion of danger, must vanish, and you are im- 
patient to mingle in the battle of the civilised 
world. 

"Go then, ye defenders of your country, 
accompanied with every auspicious omen; ad- 
vance with alacrity into the field, where God 
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The Glory of English Prose 

Himself musters the hosts of war. Religion is 
too much interested in your success not to lend 
you her aid ; she will shed over this enterprise her 
selectest influences. While you are engaged in 
the field many will repair to the closet, many to 
the sanctuary; the faithful of every name will 
employ that prayer which has power with God ; 
the feeble hands which are unequal to any other 
weapon will grasp the sword of the Spirit ; from 
myriads of humble, contrite hearts, the voice of 
intercession, supplication, and weeping, will 
mingle in its ascent to heaven with the shouts of 
battle and the shock of arms. 

' ' While you have everything to fear from the 
success of the enemy, you have every means of 
preventing that success, so that it is next to 
impossible for victory not to crown your exer- 
tions. The extent of your resources, under 
God, is equal to the justice of your cause. 

"But should Providence determine otherwise; 
should you fall in this struggle, should the 
nation fall, you will have the satisfaction (the 
purest allotted to man) of having performed 
your part ; your names will be enrolled with the 
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Letters to my Grandson 

most illustrious dead, while posterity to the end 
of time, as often as they revolve the events of 
this period (and they will incessantly revolve 
them) will turn to you a reverential eye while 
they mourn over the freedom which is entombed 
in your sepulchre. 

"I cannot but imagine the virtuous heroes, 
legislators, and patriots, of every age and coun- 
try, are bending from their elevated seats to 
witness this contest, as if they were incapable, 
till it be brought to a favourable issue, of enjoy- 
ing their eternal repose. 

"Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! 
Your mantle fell when you ascended, and thou- 
sands inflamed with your spirit, and impatient 
to tread in your steps, are ready 'to swear by 
Him that sitteth upon the throne and liveth for 
ever and ever,' they will protect freedom in her 
last asylums, and never desert that cause which 
you sustained by your labours and cemented 
with your blood. 

"And Thou, Sole Ruler among the children 
of men, to whom the shields of the earth belong, 
'gird on Thy sword. Thou most Mighty'; go 
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The Glory of English Prose 

forth with our hosts in the day of battle ! Impart, 
in addition to their hereditary valour, that con- 
fidence of success which springs from Thy Pres- 
ence! 

"Pour into their hearts the spirit of departed 
heroes! Inspire them with Thine own, and, 
while led by Thine Hand and fighting under Thy 
banners, open Thou their eyes to behold in every 
valley and in every plain, what the prophet 
beheld by the same illuminations — chariots of 
fire, and horses of fire ! 

"Then shall the strong man be as tow, and the 
maker of it as a spark ; and they shall both burn 
together, and none shall quench them. " 

We, who have just emerged, shattered in- 
deed and reeling, from another and yet more 
awful combat for freedom, can the better 
extend our sympathy to those forefathers of 
ours situated in like case, and can imagine 
with what beating hearts they must have 
listened to so magnificent a call to arms as 
this; commingling prayer, exhortation, and 
benediction. 

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Letters to my Grandson 

Napoleon, after all, waged his wars with us 
according to the laws of nations, the rules of 
civilised peoples, and the dictates of decent 
humanity. But never since Christianity has 
been established has one man committed so 
dread and awful an acctimulation of public 
iniquities as stand for ever against the base 
and cowardly name of William Hohenzollem, 
Emperor in Germany. He spat upon the 
ancient chivalries of battle; he prostituted 
the decent amenities of diplomacy; he pol- 
luted with infamy and murder the splendid 
comradeship of the sea. 

When the captain of one of his submarines 
placed upon his deck the captured crew of an 
imarmed merchant vessel which he had sunk, 
destroyed their boats, took from them their 
life-belts, carried them miles away from any 
floating wreckage, and then projected them 
into the sea to drown, this imspeakable 
monarch approved the awful deed and decor- 
ated the ruffian for his infamous cruelty. 

When gallant Fryatt, fulfilling every duty 
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The Glory of English Prose 

a captain owes to his unarmed crew and 
helpless passengers, turned the bows of his 
peaceful packet-boat upon the submarine 
which was being used to murder them all in 
cold blood, he fell into this Kaiser's hands, 
and the coward wreaked his vengeance upon 
nobility that was beyond his comprehension 
and valour that rendered him insignificant. 

Of these horrible acts the proofs stand 
unchallenged, and for such deeds as these the 
world has cast him out; thrown him down 
from one of the greatest thrones in history; 
and left him in the place to which, white with 
terror, he ignominiously fled, stripped of all his 
power and splendour, his crowns, his crosses, 
and his diadems. 

Idle is it for this man and his apologists to 
plead any extenuation or excuse. 

It was his custom in the plenitude of his 
power to declare himself answerable for his 
actions only to God and himself. Then let 
the judgment of God be upon him. When we 
recall the awful and unnumbered horrors with 

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Letters to my Grandson 

which he covered Europe, I doubt whether all 
history can furnish a parallel to him. 

By his authority helpless Belgium was 
invaded, treaties treacherously broken, and 
her people slaughtered. By his authority 
her priests were murdered in cold blood and 
her nuns violated by his vile soldiery. By his 
authority poison gases were first projected 
with low cunning upon brave and honourable 
adversaries. By his authority hospital ships 
at sea were sent to the bottom. 

But time and the might of free nations have, 
after fearful suJfferings, dissipated his invincible 
armies, and they have shrivelled before the 
wrath of mankind. The whole world rose up 
in its offended majesty and tore from him that 
shining armour of which it was his custom to 
boast; and, with the brand of Cain upon him, 
he now lies obscurely in Holland, bereft of all 
the trappings of his sinister power. 

There were times in the past when justice 
would have avenged such awful crimes as lie at 
this man's door with the torture of his living 

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The Glory of English Prose 

body and the desecration of his hfeless remains, 
but his conquerors disdained to debase them- 
selves by imitating his own abominations ; and 
they left him to afford a spectacle to posterity 
as the supreme example of human ignominy ! 
When you are old, Antony, and this greatest 
of all wars has become part of England's 
history, you will be proud and happy to 
remember that your own father, at the first 
call for volunteers, laid down the pencil and 
scale of his peaceful profession, went out to 
fight for his country in the trenches in France, 
was wounded almost to death, and was saved 
only by the skill and devotion of one of the 
greatest siu-geons of the day.' All the best 
blood of England, Scotland, and Ireland went 
marching together to defend the freedom of 
the world, and upon their hearts were en- 
graven the glorious words : — 

"Blessed be the Lord my strength, which 
teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to 
fight." 

' Sir Arbuthnot Lane. 

lOI 



Letters to my Grandson 

May such a call never come to our beloved 
country again! But if it does, Antony, I 
know where you will be found without need of 
exhortations from me. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



i 



102 



17 

My dear Antony, 

Grattan, of whom I have already written, 
had in the first Lord Plunket a successor and 
a compatriot very little his inferior in the gift 
of oratory. 

He was bom in 1764, and was therefore 
some fourteen years younger than Grattan, 
whom he survived by thirty-four years. 

Like Grattan, he displayed a burning 
patriotism and, like him, fiercely opposed the 
Act of Union. 

Few orators have displayed greater powers 
of clear reason and convincing logic than 
Plunket. It may be admitted that he seldom 
rose to great heights of eloquence, but tradi- 
tion credits his delivery with a quality of 
dignity amounting almost to majesty. The 
gift of oratory consists in how things are said 
as much as in what things are said, and the 

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Letters to my Grandson 

voice, gesture, and manner of Plunket were 
commanding and magnificent. 

When Attorney- General in Ireland, in 1823, 
in a speech prosecuting the leaders of the riot 
known as "the Bottle Riot," Plunket uttered 
the following fine tribute to the character of 
William the Third :— 

"Perhaps, my lords, there is not to be found 
in the annals of history a character more truly 
great than that of William the Third. Perhaps 
no person has ever appeared on the theatre of 
the world who has conferred more essential or 
more lasting benefits on mankind; on these 
countries, certainly none. When I look at the 
abstract merits of his character, I contemplate 
him with admiration and reverence. Lord of a 
petty principality — destitute of all resources but 
those with which nature had endowed him — 
regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose 
battles he fought; thwarted in all his counsels; 
embarrassed in all his movements; deserted in 
his most critical enterprises — he continued to 
mould all those discordant materials, to govern 
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The Glory of English Prose 

all these warring interests, and merely by the 
force of his genius, the ascendancy of his integ- 
rity, and the immovable firmness and constancy 
of his nature, to combine them into an indissol- 
uble alliance against the schemes of despotism 
and universal domination of the most powerful 
monarch in Europe, seconded by the ablest 
generals, at the head of the bravest and best 
disciplined armies in the world, and wielding, 
without check or control, the unlimited resources 
of his empire. He was not a consummate gen- 
eral; military men will point out his errors; in 
that respect Fortune did not favour him, save 
by throwing the lustre of adversity over all his 
virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat, but 
always rose adversa rerum immersabilis unda. 
Looking merely at his shining qualities and 
achievements, I admire him as I do a Scipio, a 
Regulus, a Fabius ; a model of tranquil courage, 
undeviating probity, and armed with a resolute- 
ness and constancy in the cause of truth and 
freedom, which rendered him superior to the 
accidents that control the fate of ordinary men. 
"But this is not all — I feel that to him, under 
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Letters to my Grandson 

God, I am, at this moment, indebted for the 
enjoyment of the rights which I possess as a 
subject of these free countries ; to him I owe the 
blessings of civil and religious liberty, and I 
venerate his memory with a fervour of devotion 
suited to his illustrious qualities and to his god- 
like acts." 

This is not so magnificent a panegyric as 
that of Grattan in his written tribute to Chat- 
ham, but, enhanced by the gesture and voice 
of the great orator, it was reputed to have 
left a deep impression upon all who heard it. 

But few speeches, however eloquent, sur- 
vive, while the printed work of the writer may 
long endure; but to the orator is given what 
the writer never experiences — the fierce enjoy- 
ment, amounting almost to rapture, of holding 
an audience entranced under the spell of the 
spoken cadences; and English, Antony, has a 
splendour all its own when uttered by a 
master of its august music. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 

io6 



i8 

My dear Antony, 

To-day I will write about Robert Southey, 
and, as he and Coleridge married sisters, you 
may claim a distant relationship with him. 
His personal character was beautiful and 
unselfish, and his dwelling at Keswick was the 
home that for years sheltered Coleridge's 
children. 

With hardly an exception the poets of Eng- 
land have had an easy and royal mastery of 
prose; and in the case of Robert Southey 
there are some, and they are not the worst 
critics, who anticipate that his prose will long 
outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame. 

We may suppose that to a man whose whole 
private life was stainlessly dedicated to a noble 
rectitude of conduct, and whose every act was 
sternly subjected to the judgment of an 
unbending conscience, some circumstances of 

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Letters to my Grandson 

the private life of Nelson must have been dis- 
tasteful and open to censure; but no such 
reservations dimmed the splendour of Southey 's 
tribute to the public hero who gave his life in 
the act of establishing, beyond reach of dis- 
pute or cavil, the throne of England as Queen 
of the Sea. 

"The death of Nelson was felt in England as 
something more than a public calamity; men 
started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as 
if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. 
An object of our admiration and affection, of our 
pride and of our hopes, was suddenly taken from 
us, and it seemed as if we had never, till then, 
known how deeply we loved and reverenced 
him. 

"What the country had lost in its great naval 
hero — the greatest of our own, and of all former 
times, was scarcely taken into the account of 
grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed 
his part, that the maritime war, after the battle 
of Trafalgar, was considered at an end ; the fleets 
of the enemy were not merely defeated, but 
1 08 



The Glory of English Prose 

destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new 
race of seamen reared for them, before the pos- 
sibiHty of their invading our shores could again 
be contemplated. 

"It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflec- 
tion upon the magnitude of our loss that we 
mourned for him; the general sorrow was of a 
higher character. The people of England grieved 
that funeral ceremonies, public monuments and 
posthumous rewards, were all which they could 
now bestow upon him whom the king, the legisla- 
ture, and the nation, would alike have delighted to 
honour ; whom every tongue would have blessed ; 
whose presence in every village through which 
he might have passed would have wakened the 
church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, 
have drawn children from their sports to gaze 
upon him, and 'old men from the chimney cor- 
ner' to look upon Nelson ere they died. 

"The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, 
indeed, with the usual forms of rejoicing, but 
they were without joy; for such already was the 
glory of the British Navy through Nelson's sur- 
passing genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive 
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Letters to my Grandson 

any addition from the most signal victory that 
ever was achieved upon the sea; and the de- 
struction of this mighty fleet, by which all the 
maritime schemes of France were totally frus- 
trated, hardly appeared to add to our security 
or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch 
the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt 
ourselves as secure as now, when they were no 
longer in existence. 

"There was reason to suppose from the 
appearances upon opening the body, that in the 
course of nature he might have attained, like his 
father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said 
to have fallen prematurely whose work was 
done; nor ought he to be lamented, who died so 
full of honours, and at the height of human fame. 
The most triumphant death is that of a martyr; 
the most awful, that of the martyred patriot; 
the most splendid, that of the hero in the hour 
of victory ; and if the chariot and the horses of 
fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's transla- 
tion, he could scarcely have departed in a 
brighter blaze of glory. 

"He has left us, not indeed his mantle of 
no 



The Glory of English Prose 

inspiration, but a name and an example which 
are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the youth 
of England; a name which is our pride, and an 
example which will continue to be our shield and 
our strength." 

Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, 
and the great war with Germany has failed 
to displace her from that splendid throne. 
For the plain fact of history remains that, after 
the battle of Jutland, the German High Seas 
Fleet never ventured out of port again till the 
end of the war ; and when it did emerge from its 
ignominious security, it sailed to captivity at 
Scapa Flow, there ultimately to repose on the 
bottom of the sea. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



Ill 



19 

My dear Antony, 

There are four very celebrated lines written 
by Walter Savage Landor which you may 
have heard quoted ; they were written towards 
the close of his life, and are certainly dis- 
tinguished and memorable : — 

" I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; 
Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art; 
I warmed both hands before the fire of life; 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 

It does not detract from the merit of the lines 
that as a fact Landor was of a fiery disposition, 
and strove a great deal with many adversaries, 
often of his own creation, throughout his long 
life ; ' and although he was of a fierce and com- 
bative nature he displayed in his writings a 
classical restraint and tender beauty hardly 
achieved by his contemporaries. 

' Born 1775, died 1864. 

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The Glory of English Prose 

In the form of an imaginary conversation 
between ^sop and Rhodope, Landor makes the 
latter describe how her father, in the famine, 
unbeknown to her, starved that she might 
have plenty, and, when all was gone, took her 
to the market-place to sell her that she might 
live. There is an exquisite delicacy in this 
dialogue that places it among the wonders of 
literature : — 

''Rhodope. Never shall I forget the morning 
when my father, sitting in the coolest part of the 
house, exchanged his last measure of grain for a 
chlamys of scarlet cloth, fringed with silver. 
He watched the merchant out of the door, and 
then looked wistfully into the comchest. I, 
who thought there was something worth seeing, 
looked in also, and finding it empty, expressed 
my disappointment, not thinking, however, 
about the corn. A faint and transient smile 
came over his countenance at the sight of mine. 
He unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with 
both hands before me, and then cast it over my 
shoulders. I looked down on the glittering fringe 

8 113 



Letters to my Grandson 

and screamed with joy. He then went out ; and 
I know not what flowers he gathered, but he 
gathered many; and some he placed in my 
bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him 
with captious pride, first that I could arrange 
them better, and again that I would have only 
the white. However, when he had selected all 
the white and I had placed a few of them accord- 
ing to my fancy, I told him (rising in my slipper) 
he might crown me with the remainder. 

"The splendour of my apparel gave me a 
sensation of authority. Soon as the flowers had 
taken their station on my head, I expressed a 
dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by 
my father, just as if I could have seen how they 
appeared ! But he knew that there was at least 
as much pleasure as pride in it, and perhaps we 
divided the latter (alas ! not both) pretty equally. 

"He now took me into the market-place, 
where a concourse of people were waiting for the 
purchase of slaves. Merchants came and looked 
at me; some commending, others disparaging; 
but all agreeing that I was slender and delicate, 
that I could not live long, and that I should give 
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The Glory of English Prose 

much trouble. Many would have bought the 
chlamys, but there was something less saleable 
in the child and flowers. 

' ' Msop. Had thy features been coarse and thy 
voice rustic, they would all have patted thy 
cheeks and found no fault in thee. 

''Khodope. As it was, every one had bought 
exactly such another in time past, and been 
a loser by it. At these speeches, I perceived the 
flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my 
father ' s agitation . Although he scoffed at them , 
knowing my healthiness, he was troubled inter- 
nally, and said many short prayers, not very 
unlike imprecations, turning his head aside. 
Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last 
several talents were offered for me, and by the 
very man who in the beginning had undervalued 
me most, and prophesied the worst of me. 
My father scowled at him and refused the 
money. I thought he was playing a game, 
and began to wonder what it could be, since 
I had never seen it played before. Then I 
fancied it might be some celebration because 
plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that 
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Letters to my Grandson 

my father had bartered the last of the com he 
hoarded. 

' ' I grew more and more delighted at the sport. 
But soon there advanced an elderly man, who 
said gravely, 'Thou hast stolen this child; her 
vesture alone is worth a hundred drachmas. 
Carry her home again to her parents, and do it 
directly, or Nemesis and the Eumenides will 
overtake thee. ' Knowing the estimation in 
which my father had always been holden by his 
fellow-citizens, I laughed again and pinched his 
ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst 
forth into no resentment at these reproaches, 
but said calmly, *I think I know thee by name, 
O guest ! Surely thou art Xanthus, the Samian. 
Deliver this child from famine. ' 

"Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and 
thinking it was now part of the game, I held out 
both my arms, and protruded my whole body 
toward the stranger. He would not receive me 
from my father's neck, but he asked me with 
benignity and solicitude if I was hungry; at 
which I laughed again, and more than ever; for 
it was early in the morning, soon after the first 
ii6 



The Glory of English Prose 

meal, and my father had nourished me most 
carefully and plentifully in all the days of the 
famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, 
took out of a sack, which one of his slaves carried 
at his side, a cake of wheaten bread and a piece 
of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held 
the honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking 
it the most of a dainty. He dashed it to the 
ground, but seizing the bread he began to devour 
it ferociously. This also I thought was in the 
play, and I clapped my hands at his distortions. 
But Xanthus looked at him like one afraid, and 
smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name 
the price. ' My father now placed me in his 
arms, naming a price much below what the other 
had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever with 
thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign 
my child. ' 

"But while Xanthus was counting out the 
silver my father seized the cake again, which the 
slave had taken up and was about to replace in 
the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the 
taste, and the delay. Suddenly there arose 
much tumult. Turning round in the old wo- 
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Letters to my Grandson 

man's bosom who had received me from Xan- 
thus, I saw my beloved father struggHng on the 
ground, Hvid and speechless. The more violent 
my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me 
away ; and many were soon between us. 

* ' Little was I suspicious that he had suffered 
the pangs of famine long before: alas! and he 
had suffered them for me. Do I weep while I 
am telling you they ended? I could not have 
closed his eyes; I was too young; but I might 
have received his last breath, the only comfort 
of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him 
blameable, O iEsop?" 

"JEsop. It was sublime humanity; it was for- 
bearance and self-denial which even the immor- 
tal gods have never shown us. " 

The Dream of Petrarca is, I think, more 
famous but not more beautiful than this 
narrative of Rhodope ; it lacks the deep human 
tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome 
child, and the self-contained father silently 
perishing of hunger for her; but if the ^sop 
and Rhodope had never been written, the 

ii8 



The Glory of English Prose 

Dream of Petrarca would secure its author a 
place among the immortals : — 

"... Wearied with the length of my walk 
over the mountains, and finding a soft molehill, 
covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I laid 
my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how 
long it was before a species of dream or vision 
came over me. 

"Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; 
each was winged; but the wings were hanging 
down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One of 
them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, 
looking at me frequently, said to the other, 
'He is under my guardianship for the present; 
do not awaken him with that feather.' Me- 
thought, on hearing the whisper, I saw some- 
thing like the feather on an arrow ; and then the 
arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point, 
although he carried it in such a manner that it 
was difficult at first to discover more than a palm's 
length of it ; the rest of the shaft (and the whole 
of the barb) was behind his ankles. 

'This feather never awakens anyone,' re- 
plied he, rather petulantly, 'but it brings more 
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Letters to my Grandson 

of confident security, and more of cherished 
dreams, than you, without me, are capable of 
imparting. ' 

'"Be it so!' answered the gentler; 'none is 
less inclined to quarrel or dispute than am I. 
Many whom you have wounded grievously call 
upon me for succour ; but so little am I disposed 
to thwart you, it is seldom I venture to do more 
for them than to whisper a few words of comfort 
in passing. How many reproaches on these 
occasions have been cast upon me for indiffer- 
ence and infidelity! Nearly as many, and 
nearly in the same terms as upon you. ' 

" 'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be 
thought so alike!' said Love contemptuously. 
'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance 
to you; the dullest have observed it. ' I fancied 
I turned my eyes to where he was pointing, and 
saw at a distance the figure he designated. 
Meanwhile the contention went on uninterrupt- 
edly. Sleep was slow in asserting his power 
or his benefits. Love recapitulated them; 
but only that he might assert his own above 
them. 

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The Glory of English Prose 

"Suddenly he called upon me to decide, 
and to choose my patron. Under the influ- 
ence, first of the one, then of the other, I 
sprang from repose to rapture, I alighted 
from rapture on repose, and knew not which 
was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, 
and declared he would cross me through the 
whole of my existence. Whatever I might 
on other occasions have thought of his verac- 
ity, I now felt too surely that he would keep 
his word. 

"At last, before the close of the altercation, 
the third Genius had advanced, and stood near 
us. I cannot tell you how I knew him, but I 
knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless 
as I was at beholding him, I soon became famil- 
iar with his features. First they seemed only 
calm; presently they grew contemplative; and 
lastly beautiful; those of the Graces them- 
selves are less regular, less harmonious, less 
composed. 

"Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a 
countenance in which there was somewhat of 
anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried, 'Go 

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away ! go away ! nothing that thou touchest, Hves !' 
'Say rather, child!' repHed the advancing form, 
and advancing grew loftier and statelier, 'say 
rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious 
lives its own true life until my wing hath passed 
over it. ' 

"Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down 
with his forefinger the stiff short feathers on 
his arrow-head, but replied not. Although he 
frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded 
him less and less, and scarcely looked towards 
him. The milder and calmer Genius, the third, 
in proportion as I took courage to contemplate 
him, regarded me with more and more com- 
placency. He held neither flower nor arrow as 
the others did, but throwing back the clusters 
of dark curls that overshadowed his counte- 
nance, he presented to me his hand, openly and 
benignly. I shrank on looking at him so near, 
and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not 
without an expression of pity, at perceiving my 
diffidence, my timidity; for I remembered how 
soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and en- 
trancing was Love's. 

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' ' By degrees I became ashamed of my ingrati- 
tude, and turning my face away, I held out my 
arms, and I felt my neck within his; the cool- 
ness of freshest morning breathed around; the 
heavens seemed to open above me, while the 
beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on my 
head. I would now have looked for those 
others, but knowing my intention by my ges- 
ture, he said consolatorily, 'Sleep is on his 
way to the Earth, where many are calling 
him; but it is not to these he hastens, for 
every call only makes him fly further off. Se- 
dately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as 
capricious and volatile as the more arrogant 
and ferocious one. ' 

" 'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? 
If not too late, I would propitiate and appease 
him,' 

'He who cannot follow me; he who cannot 
overtake and pass me,' said the Genius, 'is 
unworthy of the name, the most glorious in earth 
or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and 
ready to receive thee. ' 

"I looked: the earth was under me: I saw 
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only the clear blue sky, and something brighter 
above it." 

There is something most rare and refined 
and precious in this vision, told as it is with a 
sweet serenity. But it does not touch the 
heart like the Msop and Rhodope. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



124 



20 

My dear Antony, 

I now come to speak of one whose fame was 
familiar to me as a boy — the great Lord 
Brougham, — for he Uved till 1868. I remem- 
ber that he was vehemently praised and 
blamed as a politician, but with such matters 
others have dealt; in this letter, Antony, we 
will concern ourselves with the glory of English 
prose as it poured from Lord Brougham in two 
of his greatest speeches. 

He was an orator whose voice was uplifted 
throughout a long and strenuous life in con- 
demnation of all the brutalities and oppres- 
sion of his time, and to whose eloquence the 
triumphant cause of freedom stands for ever 
in deep obligation. 

His great speech on Law Reform in the 
House of Commons, in 1828, took six hours to 
deliver, and the concluding passage, which 

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Letters to my Grandson 

mounted to a plane of lofty declamation, dis- 
played no sign of exhaustion, and was listened 
to with strained attention by an absorbed and 
crowded audience : — 

"The course is clear before us; the race is 
glorious to run. You have the power of sending 
your name down through all times, illustrated 
by deeds of higher fame, and more useful im- 
port, than ever were done within these walls. 

"You saw the greatest warrior of the age — 
conqueror of Italy — humbler of Germany — 
terror of the North — saw him account all his 
matchless victories poor, compared with the 
triumph you are now in a condition to win — saw 
him contemn the fickleness of fortune, while, in 
despite of her, he could pronounce his memor- 
able boast, ' I shall go down to posterity with the 
Code in my hand ! ' 

' ' You have vanquished him in the field ; strive 
now to rival him in the sacred arts of peace! 
Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in arms you 
overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be 
ecHpsed by the more solid and enduring splen- 
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The Glory of English Prose 

dour of the Reign. The praise which false 
courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, 
the Justinians of their day, will be the just 
tribute of the wise and the good to that monarch 
under whose sway so mighty an undertaking 
shall be accomplished. Of a truth, the holders 
of sceptres are most chiefly to be envied for that 
they bestow the power of thus conquering, and 
ruling thus. 

"It was the boast of Augustus— it formed 
part of the glare in which the perfidies of his 
earlier years were lost,— that he found Rome of 
brick, and left it of marble; a praise not un- 
worthy a great prince, and to which the present 
reign also has its claims. But how much nobler 
will be the sovereign's boast when he shall have 
it to say, that he found law dear, and left it 
cheap; found it a sealed book— left it a living 
letter; found it the patrimony of the rich— left 
it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two- 
edged sword of craft and oppression— left it the 
staff of honesty and the shield of innocence! 

"To me, much reflecting on these things, it 
has always seemed a worthier honour to be the 
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Letters to my Grandson 

instrument of making you bestir yourselves in 
this high matter, than to enjoy all that office 
can bestow — office, of which the patronage 
would be an irksome encumbrance, the emolu- 
ments superfluous to one content with the rest 
of his industrious fellow-citizens that his own 
hands minister to his wants ; and as for the power 
supposed to follow it — I have lived near half a 
century, and I have learned that power and 
place may be severed. 

"But one power I do prize; that of being the 
advocate of my countrymen here, and their 
fellow-labourers elsewhere, in those things which 
concern the best interests of mankind. That 
power, I know full well, no government can 
give — no change take away!" 

His speech on negro slavery made a deep 
impression upon the country, and rose towards 
its termination, gradually, but with ever- 
ascending periods, to a close of absolute 
majesty: — 

' ' I regard the freedom of the negro as accom- 
plished and sure. Why? Because it is his 
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right — because he has shown himself fit for it; 
because a pretext, or a shadow of a pretext, can 
no longer be devised for withholding that right 
from its possessor. I know that all men at this 
day take a part in the question, and they will no 
longer bear to be imposed upon, now they are 
well informed. My reliance is firm and unflinch- 
ing upon the great change which I have wit- 
nessed — the education of the people, unfettered 
by party or by sect — witnessed from the begin- 
ning of its progress, I may say from the hour of 
its birth! Yes! It was not for a humble man 
like me to assist at royal births with the illus- 
trious Prince who condescended to grace the 
pageant of this opening session, or the great 
captain and statesman in whose presence I am 
now proud to speak. But with that illustrious 
Prince, and with the father of the Queen, I 
assisted at that other birth, more conspicuous 
still. With them, and with the head of the 
House of Russell, incomparably more illustrious 
in my eyes, I watched over its cradle — I marked 
its growth — I rejoiced in its strength — I wit- 
nessed its maturity; I have been spared to see 

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Letters to my Grandson 

it ascend the very height of supreme power ; di- 
recting the councils of state; accelerating every 
great improvement; uniting itself with every 
good work; propping all useful institutions; 
extirpating abuses in all our institutions ; passing 
the bounds of our European dominion, and in 
the New World, as in the Old, proclaiming that 
freedom is the birthright of man — that distinc- 
tion of colour gives no title to oppression — that 
the chains now loosened must be struck off, and 
even the marks they have left effaced — pro- 
claiming this by the same eternal law of our 
nature which makes nations the masters of their 
own destiny, and which in Europe has caused 
every tyrant's throne to quake! 

' ' But they need feel no alarm at the progress 
of light who defend a limited monarchy and sup- 
port popular institutions — who place their chief- 
est pride not in ruling over slaves, be they white 
or be they black, not in protecting the oppressor, 
but in wearing a constitutional crown, in holding 
the sword of justice with the hand of mercy, in 
being the first citizen of a country whose air is 
too pure for slavery to breathe, and on whose 
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The Glory of English Prose 

shores, if the captive's foot but touch, his fetters 
of themselves fall off. To the resistless progress 
of this great principle I look with a confidence 
which nothing can shake ; it makes all improve- 
ment certain ; it makes all change safe which it 
produces; for none can be brought about unless 
it has been prepared in a cautious and salutary 
spirit. 

"So now the fulness of time is come for at 
length discharging our duty to the African 
captive. I have demonstrated to you that 
everything is ordered — every previous step 
taken — all safe, by experience shown to be safe, 
for the long-desired consummation. The time 
has come, the trial has been made, the hour is 
striking; you have no longer a pretext for hesi- 
tation, or faltering, or delay. The slave has 
shown, by four years' blameless behaviour, and 
devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, 
that he is as fit for his freedom as any English 
peasant, ay, or any lord whom I now address. 

"I demand his rights; I demand his liberty 
without stint. In the name of justice and of 
law — in the name of reason — in the name of 
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Letters to my Grandson 

God, who has given you no right to work injus- 
tice; I demand that your brother be no longer 
trampled upon as your slave ! I make my appeal 
to the Commons, who represent the free people 
of England; and I require at their hands the 
performance of that condition for which they 
paid so enormous a price — that condition which 
all their constituents are in breathless anxiety 
to see fulfilled ! I appeal to this House. Heredi- 
tary judges of the first tribunal in the world — 
to you I appeal for justice. Patrons of all the 
arts that humanise mankind — under your pro- 
tection I place humanity herself! To the 
merciful Sovereign of a free people I call aloud 
for mercy to the hundreds of thousands for 
whom half a million of her Christian sisters have 
cried aloud — I ask that their cry may not have 
risen in vain. But first I turn my eye to the 
throne of all justice, and devoutly humbUng 
myself before Him who is of purer eyes than to 
behold such vast iniquitieSj^ I implore that the 
curse hovering over the head of the unjust and 
the oppressor be averted from us — that your 
hearts may be turned to mercy — and that over 
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The Glory of English Prose 

all the earth His will may at length be 
done!" 

This is nobly to use noble gifts ; it is difficult 
to think ill of a man who can carry oratory for 
a glorious object to such heights of splendour. 
It may seem a duty to some to darken his 
character with detraction, but his inspiring 
words remain supreme and unsullied and will 
still live when such faults as may be truly laid 
to his charge are long forgotten. To fight for 
a great cause, Antony, is rightly to use great 
powers, and this is what Lord Brougham did 
with all his might. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



133 



21 

My dear Antony, 

In the great emprise of war it must often 
happen that the most awful scenes of mani- 
fested human power, and the most godHke 
deeds of human glory, are lost to the 
contemporary world, and utterly unknown to 
succeeding generations, because they were 
witnessed by no man with the gift of expres- 
sion who could record for after time, in 
adequate language, the majestic spectacle. 

In the great war against Germany no great 
writer has yet appeared who was personally in 
touch as a living witness of the countless deeds 
of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance 
that were everywhere displayed upon that 
immense far-stretched front. 

But in the wars of former times, a whole 
battle could be witnessed from its beginning to 
its end by a single commander, and no scenes 

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in human life could be more terrible and soul- 
stirring than the awful ebb and flow of a great 
combat in which the victory of armies and the 
fate of nations hung in the balance. 

The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War 
might easily at this date have long been for- 
fotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier 
been as puissant as his sword. The battle had 
raged for hours, and the British were well-nigh 
overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty officers, 
and over four hundred men out of five hundred 
and seventy had fallen in the 57th alone; not 
a third were left standing in the other regi- 
ments that had been closely engaged through- 
out the day. Then Cole was ordered up with 
his fourth division as a last hope, and this is 
how Sir William Napier records their 
advance :— 

"Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst 
of the smoke and rapidly separating itself from 
the confused and broken multitude, startled the 
enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing 
onwards as to an assured victory ; they wavered, 
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Letters to my Grandson 

hesitated, and vomiting forth a storm of fire 
hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while 
a fearful discharge of grape from all their artil- 
lery whistled through the British ranks . . . the 
English battalions, struck by the iron tempest, 
reeled and staggered like sinking ships; but 
suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on 
their terrible enemies, and then was seen with 
what a strength and majesty the British soldier 
fights. 

"In vain did Soult with voice and gesture 
animate his Frenchmen ; in vain did the hardiest 
veterans, breaking from the crowded columns, 
sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to 
open out on such a fair field ; in vain did the mass 
itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fire indis- 
criminately upon friends and foes, while the 
horsemen hovering on the flank threatened 
to charge the advancing line. 

' ' Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. 

' ' No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no 

nervous enthusiasm weakened the stability of 

their order ; their flashing eyes were bent on the 

dark columns in their front; their measured 

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The Glory of English Prose 

tread shook the ground ; their dreadful volleys 
swept away the head of every formation; their 
deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant 
cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous 
crowd as slowly, and with a horrid carnage, it 
was pushed by the incessant vigour of the 
attack to the farthest edge of the height. There 
the French reserve, mixing with the struggling 
multitude, endeavoured to restore the fight, but 
only augmented the irremediable disorder, and 
the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened 
cliff, went headlong down the steep; the rain 
flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, 
and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the 
remnant of six thousand unconquerable British 
soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill ! 

' ' The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted 
victor reels as he places it on his bleeding front. 

"All that night the rain poured down, and the 
river and the hills and the woods resounded with 
the dismal clamour and groans of dying men. " 

Sir William Napier seems intimately to have 
known the transience of the gratitude of na- 

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Letters to my Grandson 

tions to those who fight their battles for them. 
At the end of his noble history of the Penin- 
sular War he lets the curtain fall upon the 
scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, 
thus : — 

"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, 
some for America, some for England: the cav- 
alry, marching through France, took shipping 
at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and 
with it all remembrance of the Veterans' ser- 
vices. 

"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen 
pitched battles, and innumerable combats; had 
made or sustained ten sieges and taken four 
great fortresses; had twice expelled the French 
from Portugal, once from Spain ; had penetrated 
France, and killed, wounded, or captured two 
hundred thousand enemies — leaving of their 
own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, 
whiten the plains and mountains of the Penin- 
sula." 

Science and the base malignity of our latest 
adversaries have debased modem warfare, as 

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The Glory of English Prose 

waged by them, from its ancient dignity and 
honour; and they have conducted it so as to 
make it difficult to beHeve that from the 
Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the 
petty officer at sea that nation can produce a 
single gentleman. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



139 



22 

My dear Antony, 

This letter, like the last one, is concerned 
with war. War brings to every man not 
incapacitated by age or physical defects the 
call of his country to fight, and if need be to 
die, for it. It also exposes to view the few 
pusillanimovis young men who are satisfied 
to enjoy protection from the horrors of in- 
vasion and the priceless boon of personal 
freedom, secured to them by the self-sacrifice 
and valour of others, while they themselves 
remain snugly at home and talk of their 
consciences. 

Patriotism such as that which in 19 14 led 
the flower of our race to flock in countless 
thousands to the standards and be enrolled 
for battle in defence of 

"This precious stone set in the silver 
sea," 

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The Glory of English Prose 

"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this 
England, " 

being without doubt or cavil one of the 
noblest emotions of the human heart, has 
often been the begetter of inspired prose. 

Our own great war has not yet produced 
many fine utterances, and I go back to-day to 
a contemporary of Sir William Napier for one 
of the noblest outbtusts of eloquence express- 
ive of a burning patriotism that has ever been 
poured forth. 

Someone in the days when Wellington was 
alive had alluded in the House of Lords to the 
Irish as "aliens," and Richard Shell, rising in 
the House of Commons, lifted up his voice 
for his country in an impassioned flight of 
generous eloquence. 

Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the 
battle of Waterloo, happened to be seated 
opposite to Shell in the House, and to him 
Shell appealed with the deepest emotion to 
support him in his vindication of his country's 
valour. None will in these days deny that 

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Letters to my Grandson 

our fellow-citizens of Ireland who went to the 
war displayed a courage as firm and invincible 
as our own : — 

"The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined 
to believe, a man of excitable temperament. His 
mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved ; 
but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, 
I cannot help thinking, that when he heard his 
countrymen (for we are his countrymen) desig- 
nated by a phrase so offensive he ought to have 
recalled the many fields of fight in which we 
have been contributors to his renown. Yes, the 
battles, sieges, fortunes, that he has passed 
ought to have brought back upon him, that 
from the earliest achievement in which he dis- 
played that military genius which has placed 
him foremost in the annals of modem warfare, 
down to that last and surpassing combat which 
has made his name imperishable, the Irish sol- 
diers, with whom our armies are filled, were the 
inseparable auxiliaries to his glory. 

* ' Whose were the athletic arms that drove their 
bayonets at Vimiera through those phalanxes 
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The Glory of English Prose 

that never reeled in the shock of war before? 
What desperate valour climbed the steeps and 
filled the moats at Badajos ! All ! all his victories 
should have rushed and crowded back upon his 
memory — Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca, Al- 
buera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! 
(and here Shell pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge 
across the House). Tell me, for you were there. 
I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from 
whose opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, 
a generous heart in an intrepid breast; tell me, 
for you must needs remember, on that day when 
the destinies of mankind were trembling in the 
balance, while death fell in showers upon them, 
when the artillery of France, levelled with a 
precision of the most deadly science, played 
upon them, when her legions, incited by the 
voice and inspired by the example of their 
mighty leader, rushed again and again to the 
onset — tell me if for one instant, when to hesi- 
tate for one instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' 
blenched ! 

"And when at length the moment for the last 
and decisive movement had arrived, and the 
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Letters to my Grandson 

valour which had so long been wisely checked 
was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with 
less heroic valour than the natives of your own 
glorious isle, precipitated herself upon the foe? 

"The blood of England, of Scotland, and oi 
Ireland, flowed in the same stream, on the same 
field. When the still morning dawned, their 
dead lay cold and stark together; in the same 
deep earth their bodies were deposited ; the green 
corn of spring is now breaking from their com- 
mingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven upon 
their union in the grave. 

"Partners in every peril — in the glory shall 
we not be permitted to participate, and shall we 
be told as a requital that we are aliens, and 
estranged from the noble country for whose 
salvation our life-blood was poured out?" 

A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, 
anger, estrangement, outrages, bloodshed, and 
murder separate us from this appealing cry 
wrung from the beating heart of this inspired 
Irishman. Is the great tragedy of England 
and Ireland that has sullied their annals for 

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The Glory of English Prose 

seven hundred years never to be brought to 
an end? Is there never to be for us a Lethe 
through which we may pass to the farther 
shore of forgetfulness and forgiveness of the 
past and reconciHation in the future? 

That you may Hve to see it, Antony, is my 
hope and prayer. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



145 



23 

My dear Antony, 

I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous 
passage on the fate of Marie Antoinette — in 
some ways the most splendid of his utterances, 
— and I now am going to quote to you a very 
great passage from Thomas Carlyle on the 
same tragic subject. 

Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must 
certainly have been familiar with Burke's 
noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emu- 
lation ; but in the result we must admit that he 
amply justifies his temerity. 

The tragic figure of the queen drawn to 
execution through the roaring mob inspired 
Carlyle with what is surely his most over- 
whelming product. 

The august shadow of the Bible is dimly 
apprehended as the words ascend upwards and 

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The Glory of English Prose 

upwards with simple sublimity to the awful 
close. 

Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous 
volumes surpasses this astonishing outburst : — 

"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully 
hurled low ! 

"For, if thy being came to thee out of old 
Hapsburg Dynasties, came it not also out of 
Heaven? Sunt lachrymcB rerum, et mentem mor- 
talia tangunt. Oh! is there a man's heart that 
thinks without pity of those long months and 
years of slow- wasting ignominy; — of thy birth 
soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit 
thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on soft- 
ness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy 
death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine 
and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the 
merciful end? 

"Look there, O man born of woman! The 
bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is grey 
with care; the brightness of those eyes is 
quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is 
stony pale as of one living in death. 
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Letters to my Grandson 

"Mean weeds which her own hand has 
mended attire the Queen of the World. The 
death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motion- 
less, which only curses environ, has to stop — a 
people drunk with vengeance will drink it again 
in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as 
the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac 
heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell ! 

"The living-dead must shudder with yet one 
more pang ; her startled blood yet again suffuses 
with the hue of agony that pale face, which she 
hides with her hands. 

"There is, then, no heart to say, 'God pity 
thee'? 

"O think not of these: think of Him Whom 
thou worshippest, the Crucified — Who also 
treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow- 
still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it 
holy, and built of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for 
thee and all the wretched ! 

' ' Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long 
last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was 
once so light — where thy children shall not dwell. 

"Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes — 
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The Glory of English Prose 

dumb lies the world; that wild-yelling world, 
and all its madness, is behind thee. " 

There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous 
narrative of the taking of the Bastille which 
has always seemed to me to give it the last 
consummate touch of greatness. 

Suddenly he pauses in the ttirmoil and dust 
and wrath and madness of that tremendous 
conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over 
peaceful France, and he exclaims: — 

"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy 
beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody 
fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on 
ships far out on the silent main ; on balls at the 
Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged 
Dames of the palace are even now dancing with 
double- jacketed Hussar-officers: — and also on 
this roaring Hell-porch of a H6tel de Ville. " 

And a few sentences f tirther on a heart of stone 
must be moved by what the archives of that 
grim prison-house revealed : — 

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Letters to my Grandson 

"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried 
despair finds voice. Read this portion of an old 
letter. 

" 'If for my consolation Monseigneur would 
grant me, for the sake of God and the Most 
Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my 
dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to 
show that she is alive! It were the greatest 
consolation I could receive; and I should for 
ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur. ' 

"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret- 
Demery, and hast no other history, — she is dead, 
that dear wife of thine, and thou art dead ! 'Tis 
fifty years since thy breaking heart put this 
question; to be heard now first, and long heard, 
in the hearts of men. " 

In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were 
no less than fifteen thousand lettres de cachet 
issued, by which anyone could be suddenly 
arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of 
protest, imprisoned perhaps for life in the 
Bastille. 

In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three 
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The Glory of English Prose 

or four thousand persons perished. Their 
deaths were spectacular, and have covered 
with execrations their dreadful executioners. 

But it is right that we should remember, 
Antony, the life-long agony and the un- 
utterable despair of the victims of that 
remorselessly cruel system which the Rev- 
olution overthrew. 

The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in 
Sartor Resartus, seems to me to come nearer 
to the above excerpts than anything else in 
Carlyle, though at a perceptible distance : — 

"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of 
the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a 
kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this 
of a truth : the thing thou seekest is already with 
thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see! 

"But it is with man's Soul as it was with 
Nature: the beginning of Creation is — Light, 
Till the eye have vision the whole members are 
in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tem- 
pest-tossed Soul, as once over the wild- wel- 
tering Chaos, it is spoken : ' Let there be Light ! ' 
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Letters to my Grandson 

Even to the greatest that has felt such moment 
is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even 
as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and 
least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; 
the rudely- jumbled conflicting elements bind 
themselves into separate Firmaments: deep, 
silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and 
the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, 
above ; instead of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have 
a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World. 
"I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no 
longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. 
Produce ! Produce ! Were it but the pitifullest 
infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, 
in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in 
thee: out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever 
thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole 
might. Work while it is called to-day; for the 
night cometh wherein no man can work. ' " 

There is another passage in Sartor Resartus 
which I have always held in veneration, 
though the field labourer is not now so * ' hardly- 
entreated " as when Carlyle wrote of him: — 

152 



The Glory of English Prose 

' ' Two men I honour, and no third. First the 
toilworn Craftsman that with earth-made imple- 
ment laboriously conquers the earth, and makes 
her man's. 

"Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, 
coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning 
virtue indefeasibly royal, as of the sceptre of 
this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, 
all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intel- 
ligence ; for it is the face of a man living manlike. 
Oh, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, 
and even because we must pity as well as love 
thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was 
thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs 
and fingers so deformed ; thou wert our conscript, 
on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles 
wert so marred. For in thee too lay a god- 
created form, but it was not to be unfolded; 
e^ncrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions 
and defacements of labour; and thy body, like 
thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toil 
on, toil on ; thou art in thy duty, be out of it who 
may: thou toilest for the altogether indispen- 
sable, for daily bread. 

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Letters to my Grandson 

"A second man I honour, and still more 
highly : him who is seen toiling for the spiritually 
indispensable ; not daily bread, but the bread of 
life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring 
towards inward harmony ; revealing this, by act 
or by word, through all his outward endeavours, 
be they high or low? Highest of all, when his 
outward and his inward endeavour are one: 
when we can name him artist ; not earthly crafts- 
man only, but inspired thinker, who with 
heaven-made implement conquers heaven for 
us! If the poor and humble toil that we have 
food, must not the high and glorious toil for him 
in return, that he have light, have guidance, 
freedom, immortality? These two, in all their 
degrees, I honour; all else is chaff and dust, 
which let the wind blow whither it listeth. 

"Unspeakably touching is it, however, when 
I find both dignities united; and he that must 
toil outwardly for the lowest of man's wants, is 
also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer 
in this world know I nothing than a peasant 
saint, could such now an3rwhere be met with. 
Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth 
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The Glory of English Prose 

itself; thou wilt see the splendour of heaven 
spring forth from the humblest depths of earth, 
like a light shining in great darkness. " 

Sartor Resartus has long taken its place 
among the greatest prose works of the nine- 
teenth century, and it is a strange commentary 
on this mandate to us all to "produce, pro- 
duce!" to find that for eleven years Carlyle 
could find no publisher who would give it in 
book form to the world ! 

It is a solemn reflection to think that there 
may be many books of eloquence and splen- 
dour that have never seen the light of publicity. 
Publishers concern themselves less with what 
is finely written than with what will best sell ; 
and in their defence it may be acceded that 
some of the masterpieces of literature have at 
their first appearance before the world fallen 
dead from the press. 

The first edition of FitzGerald's Omar 
Khayyam, issued at one shilling, was totally 
unrecognised, and copies of it might have been 

155 



Letters to my Grandson 

bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of 
trash on the pavement outside old bookshops ! 

But if once a work is pubHshed, time will 
with almost irresistible force place it ulti- 
mately in the station it deserves in the liter- 
ature of the world. 

Instant acceptance not seldom preludes 
final rejection. In the middle of the last 
century Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philo- 
sophy garnished every drawing-room table; 
and now, where is it? 

Your loving old 
G. P. 

P.S. — Do not look for the passage on Marie 
Antoinette in the French Revolution, for you 
will not find it there, but in the "Essay of the 
Diamond Necklace." 



156 



24 

My dear Antony, 

You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson 
Coleridge, who, had he lived, would very 
certainly have left a brilliant addition to the 
lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 
1798, and only lived forty -five years, dying 
when his powers were leading him to high 
fortune in that legal profession which so many 
of the family have pursued . 

He was a scholar of Eton ; a Fellow of King's 
College, Cambridge; he won the Greek and 
Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again 
in 1 82 1. To him, therefore, the classic spirit 
was inborn, and a training that omitted the 
study of Latin and Greek the very negation of 
education. He would have had something 
very trenchant to say of what is now known 
as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich 
and splendid prose, and it is no fond family 

157 



Letters to my Grandson 

partiality that leads me to quote to you his 
eloquent and precious defence of the classical 
languages : — 

"I am not one whose lot it has been to grow 
old in literary retirement, devoted to classical 
studies with an exclusiveness which might lead 
to an overweening estimate of these two noble 
languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the 
days allowed to me for such pursuits ; and I was 
constrained, still young and an unripe scholar 
to forego them for the duties of an active and 
laborious profession. They are now amuse- 
ments only, however delightful and improving. 
For I am far from assuming to understand all 
their riches, all their beauty, or all their power ; 
yet I can profoundly feel their immeasurable 
superiority in many important respects to all 
we call modern; and I would fain think that 
there are many even among my younger readers 
who can now, or will hereafter, sympathise with 
the expression of my ardent admiration. 

"Greek — the shrine of the genius of the old 
world; as universal as our race, as individual as 
158 



The Glory of English Prose 

ourselves; of infinite flexibility, or indefatigable 
strength, with the complication and the distinct- 
ness of Nature herself; to which nothing was 
vulgar, from which nothing was excluded ; speak- 
ing to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind 
like English; with words like pictures, with 
words like the gossamer films of the summer ; at 
once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer ; 
the gloom and the intensity of ^schylus; not 
compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor 
fathomed to the bottom by Plato ; not sounding 
with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its 
ardours even under the Promethean touch of 
Demosthenes ! 

"And Latin — the voice of empire and of war, 
of law and of the state, inferior to its half -parent 
and rival in the embodying of passion and in the 
distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in sus- 
taining the measured march of history; and 
superior to it in the indignant declamation of 
moral satire ; stamped with the mark of an impe- 
rial and despotising republic; rigid in its con- 
struction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluc- 
tantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, 
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Letters to my Grandson 

although opening gHmpses of Greek -like splen- 
dour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius ; 
proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and 
by him found wanting ; yet majestic in its bare- 
ness, impressive in its conciseness; the true 
language of history, instinct with the spirit of 
nations and not with the passions of individuals ; 
breathing the maxims of the world, and not the 
tenets of the schools ; one and uniform in its air 
and spirit, whether touched by the stern and 
haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive 
Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus. 

"These inestimable advantages, which no 
modern skill can wholly counterpoise, are known 
and felt by the scholar alone. He has not failed, 
in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to 
drink deep at those sacred fountains of all that 
is just and beautiful in human language. 

"The thoughts and the words of the master- 
spirits of Greece and of Rome, are inseparably 
blended in his memory ; a sense of their marvel- 
lous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their 
consummate polish, has sunk for ever in his 
heart, and thence throws out light and f ragrancy 
160 



The Glory of English Prose 

upon the gloom and the annoyance of his 
maturer years. No avocations of professional 
labour will make him abandon their wholesome 
study; in the midst of a thousand cares he will 
find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons — to 
reperuse them in the pleasurable consciousness 
of old associations, and in the clearness of manly 
judgment, and to apply them to himself and to 
the world with superior profit. 

"The more extended his sphere of learning 
in the literature of modern Europe, the more 
deeply, though the more wisely, will he reverence 
that of classical antiquity ; and in declining age, 
when the appetite for magazines and reviews, 
and the ten-times repeated trash of the day, 
has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a 
circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular 
studies as he began them, with his Homer, his 
Horace, and his Shakespeare. " 

Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of 

this beautiful passage finds in my own heart, 

only saddened with the poignant regret that 

the necessary business and occupation of the 

II i6i 



Letters to my Grandson 

passing years have dulled for me such un- 
polished facility, as I may once have possessed, 
for perusing my Homer and my Horace! 

It is, indeed, rare in these days to find 
gentlemen as familiar as were their forebears 
with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will 
probably find yoiu-self as you grow up in like 
case with myself, but there will remain for 
yoiu* unending instruction and delight all the 
glories of English literature, to give you a taste 
for which these few letters of mine are written, 
plucking only a single flower here and there 
from the most wonderful garden in the world. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



162 



25 

My dear Antony, 

Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write 
to-day, was the first of the great writers born 
in the nineteenth century, and he lived from 
1 80 1 to 1890. Besides being a master of 
English prose he was no mean poet ; but above 
all else he was a man of immense personal 
power, which was strangely associated with a 
manifest saintliness which compelled diffidence 
from those admitted to his intimacy. 

I have described him as I knew him in my 
Memories;^ and now will quote to you his 
utterance on music and its effect upon the 
heart of man, which has always seemed to me 
too precious to leave buried in a sermon : — 

"Let us take an instance, of an outward and 
earthly form, or economy, under which great 

' Pp. 52-57- 

163 



Letters to my Grandson 

wonders unknown seem to be typified; I mean 
musical sounds as they are exhibited most per- 
fectly in instrumental harmony. 

"There are seven notes in the scale; make 
them fourteen; yet what a slender outfit for so 
vast an enterprise! What Science brings so 
much out of so little ? out of what poor elements 
does some great master in it create his new 
world ! 

"Shall we say that all this exuberant inven- 
tiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like 
some game or fashion of the day, without reality, 
without meaning? We may do so; and then, 
perhaps, we shall also account theology to be a 
matter of words ; yet, as there is a divinity in the 
theology of the Church, which those who feel 
cannot communicate, so is there also in the won- 
derful creation of sublimity and beauty of which 
I am speaking. To many men the very names 
which the Science employs are utterly imcompre- 
hensible. To speak of an idea or a subject 
seems to be fanciful or trifling, to speak of the 
views which it opens upon us to be childish 
extravagance; yet is it possible that that inex- 
164 



The Glory of English Prose 

haustible evolution and disposition of notes, so 
rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, 
so various yet so majestic, should be a mere 
sound, which is gone and perishes? 

' ' Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of 
heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings 
after we know not what, and awful impressions 
from we know not whence, should be wrought 
in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and 
goes, and begins and ends in itself ? It is not so ; 
it cannot be. No ; they have escaped from some 
higher sphere, they are the outpourings of 
eternal harmony in the medium of created 
sound ; they are echoes from our home ; they are 
the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, 
or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the 
Divinic attributes; something are they besides 
themselves, which we cannot compass, which 
we cannot utter, — though mortal man, and he 
perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his 
fellows, has the gift of eliciting them. " 

Of quite another order is the Cardinal's 
description of a gentleman. Here there is no 
flight of poetical imagination, but a mani- 

165 



Letters to my Grandson 

festation of felicitous intuition and pene- 
trating insight as rare as it is convincing, 
and the generous wide vision of a man of 
the world, undimmed by the faintest trace 
of prejudice: — 

' ' Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a 
gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts 
pain. This description is both refined and, as 
far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied 
in merely removing the obstacles which hinder 
the free and unembarrassed action of those 
about him ; and he concurs with their movements 
rather than takes the initiative himself. His 
benefits may be considered as parallel to what 
are called comforts or conveniences in arrange- 
ments of a personal nature: like an easy chair 
or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling 
cold and fatigue, though nature provides both 
means of rest and animal heat without them. 

"The true gentleman in like manner carefully 

avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the 

minds of those with whom he is cast ; all clashing 

of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or 

1 66 



The Glory of English Prose 

suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great 
concern being to make everyone at their ease 
and at home. He has his eyes on all his company ; 
he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards 
the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; 
he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he 
guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics 
which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in 
conversation and never wearisome. 

"He makes light of favours while he does 
them, and seems to be receiving when he is 
conferring. He never speaks of himself except 
when compelled, never defends himself by a 
mere retort ; he has no ears for slander or gossip, 
is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who 
interfere with him, and interprets everything 
for the best. He is never mean or little in his 
disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never 
mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for argu- 
ments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say 
out. From a long-sighted prudence he observes 
the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should 
ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if 
he were one day to be our friend. He has too 
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Letters to my Grandson 

much sense to be affronted at insults, he is too 
well employed to remember injuries, and too 
indolent to bear malice. 

"He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on 
philosophical principles; he submits to pain 
because it is inevitable, to bereavement because 
it is irreparable, and to death because it is his 
destiny. If he engages in controversy of any 
kind his disciplined intellect preserves him from 
the blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps, 
but less educated minds, who, like blunt wea- 
pons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who 
mistake the point in argument, waste their 
strength in trifles, misconceive their adversary, 
and leave the question more involved than they 
find it. He may be right or wrong in his 
opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust, 
he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as 
he is decisive. 

"Nowhere shall we find greater candour, 
consideration, indulgence; he throws himself 
into the minds of his opponents, he accoimts 
for their mistakes. He knows the weakness of 
human reason as well as its strength, its pro- 
168 



The Glory of English Prose 

vince, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever he 
will be too profound and large-minded to 
ridicule religion or to act against it; he is too 
wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his infidelity. 
He respects piety and devotion ; he even supports 
institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to 
which he does not assent ; he honours the minis- 
ters of religion, and it contents him to decline 
its mysteries without assailing or denouncing 
them. He is a friend of religious toleration, and 
that, not only because his philosophy has taught 
him to look on all forms of faith with an im- 
partial eye, but also from the gentleness and 
effeminacy of feeling which is the attendant on 
civilisation. 

"Not that he may not hold a religion too, in 
his own way, even when he is not a Christian. 
In that case his religion is one of imagination 
and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those 
ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, 
without which there can be no large philosophy. 
Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God, 
sometimes he invests an unknown principle or 
quality with the attributes of perfection. And 
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Letters to my Grandson 

this deduction of his reason, or creation of his 
fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent 
thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied 
and systematic a teaching, that he even seems 
like a disciple of Christianity itself. From the 
very accuracy and steadiness of his logical 
powers, he is able to see what sentiments are 
consistent in those who hold any religious 
doctrine at all, and he appears to others to feel 
and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, 
which exist in his mind no otherwise than as a 
number of deductions. 

' ' Such are the lineaments of the ethical char- 
acter which the cultivated intellect will form 
apart from religious principle. " 

Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a 
Cardinal of the Church of Rome, full of urban- 
ity and the wisdom of the world. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



170 



26 

My dear Antony, 

I have in a former letter quoted a short but 
noble passage from Lord Macaulay on the 
great Lord Chatham. 

But I feel that the writer who was perhaps 
the greatest essayist that England has ever 
produced must not in these letters be fobbed 
off with so slight a notice and quotation. 

What has always seemed to me the suprem- 
est passage that flowed from his wonderful 
pen is to be found in his paper on Warren 
Hastings which appeared originally in the 
Edinburgh Review. 

His description in that essay of the opening 
of the great impeachment, has given all suc- 
ceeding generations a vision of one of the most 
majestic scenes in the whole history of man. 

"There have been spectacles more dazzling to 
the eye, more gorgeous with jewellery and cloth 
171 



Letters to my Grandson 

of gold, more attractive to grown-up children, 
than that which was then exhibited at West- 
minster; but, perhaps, there never was a 
spectacle so well calculated to strike a highly 
cultivated, a reflecting, an imaginative mind. 
All the various kinds of interest which belong to 
the near and to the distant, to the present and to 
the past, were collected on one spot and in one 
hour. All the talents and all the accomplish- 
ments which are developed by liberty and 
civilisation were now displayed, with every 
advantage that could be derived both from co- 
operation and from contrast. Every step in the 
proceedings carried the mind either backward, 
through many troubled centuries, to the days 
when the foundations of our constitution were 
laid ; or far away, over boundless seas and deserts, 
to dusky nations living under strange stars, 
worshipping strange gods, and writing strange 
characters from right to left. The High Court 
of Parliament was to sit, according to forms 
handed down from the days of the Planta- 
genets, on an Englishman accused of exercising 
tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Ben- 
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The Glory of English Prose 

ares, and over the ladies of the princely house of 
Oude. 

"The place was worthy of such a trial. It 
was the great hall of William Rufus, the hall 
which had resounded with acclamations at the 
inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which 
had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the 
just absolution of Somers, the hall where the 
eloquence of Straflord had for a moment awed 
and melted a victorious party inflamed with 
just resentment, the hall where Charles had 
confronted the High Court of Justice with the 
placid courage which has half redeemed his 
fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was 
wanting. The avenues were lined with grena- 
diers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry. 
The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were 
marshalled by the heralds under Garter King-at- 
Arms. The judges in their vestments of state 
attended to give advice on points of law. Near 
a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths of 
the Upper House as the Upper House then was, 
walked in solemn order from their usual place of 
assembHng to the tribunal. The junior Baron 
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Letters to my Grandson 

present led the way, George Eliot, Lord Heath- 
field, recently ennobled for his memorable 
defence of Gibraltar against the fleets and 
armies of France and Spain. The long proces- 
sion was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl 
Marshal of the realm, by the great dignitaries, 
and by the brothers and sons of the King. Last 
of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous 
by his fine person and noble bearing. The grey 
old walls were hung with scarlet. The long 
galleries were crowded by an audience such as 
has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of 
an orator. There were gathered together, from 
all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and pro- 
sperous empire, grace and female loveliness, wit 
and learning, the representatives of every 
science and of every art. There were seated 
round the Queen the fair-haired young daughters 
of the House of Brunswick. There the Am- 
bassadors of great Kings and Commonwealths 
gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no 
other country in the world could present. There 
Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, 
looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the 
174 



The Glory of English Prose 

imitations of the stage. There the historian of the 
Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero 
pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and 
when, before a senate which still retained some 
show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the 
oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by 
side, the greatest painter and the greatest 
scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured 
Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to 
us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers 
and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so 
many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to 
suspend his labours in that dark and profound 
mine from which he had extracted a vast 
treasure of erudition, a treasure too often buried 
in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious 
and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, 
massive, and splendid. There appeared the 
voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of 
the throne had in secret plighted his faith. 
There too was she, the beautiful mother of a 
beautiful race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate 
features, lighted up by love and music, art has 
rescued from the common decay. There were 
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Letters to my Grandson 

the members of that brilHant society which 
quoted, criticised, and exchanged repartees, 
under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs. Monta- 
gue. And there the ladies whose hps, more 
persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried 
the Westminster election against palace and 
treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of 
Devonshire. 

"The Serjeants made proclamation. Hast- 
ings advanced to the bar, and bent his knee. 
The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that 
great presence. He had ruled an extensive and 
populous country, had made laws and treaties, 
had sent forth armies, had set up and pulled 
down princes. And in his high place he had so 
borne himself, that all had feared him, that most 
had loved him, and that hatred itself could deny 
him no title to glory, except virtue. He looked 
like a great man, and not like a bad man. A 
person small and emaciated, yet deriving dig- 
nity from a carriage which, while it indicated 
deference to the court, indicated also habitual 
self-possession and self-respect, a high and 
intellectual forehead, a brow pensive, but not 
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The Glory of English Prose 

gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a face 
pale and worn, but serene, on which was written, 
as legibly as under the picture in the council- 
chamber at Calcutta, Mens cequa in arduis; such 
was the aspect with which the great Proconsul 
presented himself to his judges." 

Such a scene can only find its appropriate 
enactment at the centre of a great empire and 
amid a people with an august history behind 
them, conscious of present magnificence and 
confident of future glory. 

We are now far into the second century since 
that memorable spectacle filled to the walls the 
great Hall of Westminster. 

What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine 
spirit of liberty and adorned by the sacred 
principle of personal freedom, has been super- 
seded by a socialistic democracy under which 
personal freedom suffers frequent curtailments, 
and liberty is severely abridged by the man- 
dates of trade unions, the prohibitions of urban 
potentates, and the usurpations of medicine 
men. 

12 177 



Letters to my Grandson 

Under these cramping and crippling depri- 
vations we have lost the collective sense of 
greatness as a race that infused every partici- 
pator in the splendid pageant of such an event 
as the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. One 
has but to imagine an impeachment to-day 
with the dominant personages in it chosen 
from the strike leaders and labour delegates of 
the proletariat, assisted by promoted railway 
porters and ennobled grocers, to perceive what 
a distance, and down what a declivity we have 
travelled since those days when it was im- 
possible for any great public function to take 
place without its becoming naturally and with- 
out conscious effort the occasion for a mani- 
festation of the pomp, circimistance, and 
splendour inseparable from the solemn acts of 
a great people performed by their greatest 
men. 

But I am one, Antony, who look forward 
with steadfast hope and belief to a reaction 
from our present vulgarity, and to a reascen- 
sion of England to a greater dignity, honour, 

178 



The Glory of English Prose 

and nobleness both in its public and private 
life than is observable to-day. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



179 



27 

My dear Antony, 

I have not in my letters to you travelled 
beyond our own islands in search of great 
English prose, but I propose now to make one 
divergence from this rule and quote a very 
great and deservedly far-famed speech, uttered 
on a memorable occasion, of Abraham Lincoln, 
President of the United States. 

At the present time, I think, the name of 
Lincoln lies closer to the hearts of the Ameri- 
can people than that of any other, not even 
excepting Washington and Hamilton. The 
latter, though they established American 
independence, remained in a personal sense 
English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln 
was born in the backwoods in rude poverty, 
received no education but what he acquired by 
his own unaided efforts, and lived and died a 

1 80 



The Glory of English Prose 

man of the people, the ideal type of native- 
born American. 

He rose from the lowest to the highest 
position in the State, borne upwards by the 
simple nobility of his character, by the stain- 
less purity of his actions, and the splendid 
motive of all his endeavours. His speeches 
and writings derive their power and distinction 
from no tricks of oratory, felicity of diction, or 
nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal 
results of the beatings of his great heart. 

He led his people to war in the manner of a 
prophet of Israel; with an awful austerity, 
majestic, invincible, and with hand uplifted in 
sure appeal to the God of battles. On the 
field of Gettysburg, where was waged the most 
tremendous of all combats of the war, he 
came to dedicate a cemetery to the innumer- 
able dead, and these were his few and noble 
words : — 

" Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers 
brought forth upon this continent a new nation, 
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Letters to my Grandson 

conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the 
proposition that all men are created equal. 

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, 
testing whether that nation, or any nation so 
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. 
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field 
as a final resting-place for those who here gave 
their lives that that nation might live. It is 
altogether fitting and proper that we should do 
this. 

"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we 
cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. 
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled 
here, have consecrated it far above our power to 
add or detract. The world will little note nor 
long remember what we say here, but it can 
never forget what they did here. It is for us, 
the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the 
unfinished work which they who fought here have 
thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for 
us to be here dedicated to the great task remain- 
ing before us ; that from these honoured dead we 
take increased devotion to that cause for which 
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The Glory of English Prose 

they gave the last full measure of devotion ; that 
we here highly resolve that these dead shall not 
have died in vain; that this nation, under God, 
shall have a new birth of freedom; and that 
government of the people, by the people, and for 
the people, shall not perish from the earth." 

Few are the opportunities in the history of 
the world when the time, the place, the occa- 
sion, and the words spoken, have combined so 
poignantly to move the hearts of men. 

One can imagine the vast concourse standing 
awestruck and uncovered before the solemn 
splendour of this noble dedication, every 
phrase of which will remain for generations a 
treasured and sacred memory in countless 
thousands of homes of the great continent 
in the West. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



183 



28 

My dear Antony, 

The nineteenth century witnessed the rise 
of an entirely new style of English prose. 

The ancient and universal restraints were 
swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the 
buried centuries was abandoned, and there 
arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey 
and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all 
veils from their emotions, threw away all the 
shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and 
ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of im- 
passioned prose, glittering with decorative 
alliterations, and adorned with euphonious 
harmonies of vowel sounds. 

This flamboyant style seems to have syn- 
chronised with the general decline of reserve 
and ceremony in English life, and with the rise 
of the modern familiar intimacy that leaves 
no privacy even to oiu' thoughts. Our grand- 

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The Glory of English Prose 

fathers would have hesitated to have discussed 
at the dinner- table, even after the ladies had 
withdrawn, what is now set down for free 
debate at ladies' clubs, and canvassed in the 
correct columns of the Guardian. 

This new habit of mind and speech has 
affected our literature deeply and diversely. 
In the hands of the really great masters such as 
Carlyle, Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate 
revelations of the throbbings of their hearts, 
and the direct and untrammelled appeal of 
their inmost souls crying in the market-place, 
take forcible possession of oiu* affections, and 
bring them into closer touch with each one of 
us than was ever possible with the older 
restrained writers. 

But with lesser men the modern decay of 
restraint and the licence of intimacy and of the 
emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, 
and a contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and 
superlative, and redundancy; and although 
the disappearance of reserve in modem writing 
may tend to reduce all but the production of 

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Letters to my Grandson 

the great to a depressing state of vulgarity, it 
nevertheless, in the master's hand, has un- 
locked for us the doors of an Aladdin's palace! 
But even if the restraint of the ancient writers 
has disappeared from the prose of our own 
times, all great writing of necessity must 
now and always possess the quality of simplic- 
ity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of 
nature about him with the eyes of a visionary, 
and wrote of what he saw as one so inspired 
as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed 
his glorious outpourings in a raiment of perfect 
simplicity. 

"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance 
of the firmament ; and it seems to me that in the 
midst of the material nearness of these heavens, 
God means us to acknowledge His own immedi- 
ate Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 
'The earth shook, the heavens also dropped, at 
the presence of God.' 'He doth set His bow in 
the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of 
every drooping swathe of rain. His promise of 
everlasting love. 'In them hath He set a 
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The Glory of English Prose 

tabernacle for the sun,' whose burning ball, 
which, without the firmament, would be seen 
but as an intolerable and scorching circle in the 
blackness of vacuity, is by that firmament 
surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered 
by mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of 
clouds the golden pavement is spread for his 
chariot wheels at morning ; by the firmament of 
clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill 
with light at noon ; by the firmament of clouds 
the purple veil is closed at evening round the 
sanctuary of his rest ; by the mists of the firma- 
ment his implacable light is divided and its sepa- 
rated fierceness appeased into the soft blue that 
fills the depth of distance with its bloom, and the 
flush with which the mountains burn as they 
drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And 
in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with 
men, through the shadows of the firmament, 
God would seem to set forth the stooping of 
His own majesty to men, upon the throne of the 
firmament. 

"As the Creator of all the worlds, and the 
Inhabiter of eternity, we cannot behold Him ; but 
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Letters to my Grandson 

as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of 
men those heavens are indeed His dweUing- 
place. 'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is 
God's throne; nor by earth, for it is His foot- 
stool.' 

* ' And all those passings to and fro of fruitful 
showers and grateful shade, and all those visions 
of silver palaces built about the horizon, and 
voices of moaning winds and threatening thun- 
ders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, 
are but to deepen in our hearts the acceptance 
and distinctness and dearness of the simple 
words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven ! ' " 

The description of the first approach to 
Venice before the days of railways will always 
be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's 
work as one of his most characteristic and 
memorable utterances : — 

' ' In the olden days of travelling, now to return 
no more, in which distance could not be van- 
quished without toil, but in which that toil was 
rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate 
survey of the countries through which the jour- 
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The Glory of English Prose 

ney lay, and partly by the happiness of the 
evening hours, when, from the top of the last 
hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the 
quiet village, where he was to rest, scattered 
among the meadows beside its valley stream ; or, 
from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty 
perspective of the causeway, see, for the first 
time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the 
rays of sunset — hours of peaceful and thoughtful 
pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the 
railway station is perhaps not always, or to all 
men, an equivalent — in those days, I say, when 
there was something more to be anticipated and 
remembered in the first aspect of each suc- 
cessive halting place than a new arrangement of 
glass roofing and iron girder — there were few 
moments of which the recollection was more 
fondly cherished by the traveller than that 
which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close 
of the last chapter, brought him within sight of 
Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon 
from the canal of Mestre. 

' ' Not but that the aspect of the city itself was 
generally the source of some slight disappoint- 
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Letters to my Grandson 

ment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are 
far less characteristic than those of the other 
great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was 
partly di,sguised by distance, and more than 
atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and 
towers out of the rnidst, as it seemed, of the deep 
sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the 
eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of 
the vast sheet of water which stretched away in 
leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, 
or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to 
the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning 
sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating 
and disappearing gradually in knots of heaving 
shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all 
proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose 
bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such 
blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Nea- 
politan promontories, or sleeps beneath the 
marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak 
power of northern waves, yet subdued into a 
strange spacious rest, and changed from its 
angry pallor into a field of burnished gold as the 
sun declined behind the belfry tower of the 
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The Glory of English Prose 

lonely island church, fitly named *St George of 
the Sea- weed.' 

' ' As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast 
which the traveller had just left sank behind 
him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted 
irregularly with brushwood and willows ; but, at 
what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of 
Argua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, 
balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon ; two 
or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended 
themselves about their roots, and beyond these, 
beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, 
the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to 
the north — a wall of jagged blue, here and there 
showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty 
precipices, fading far back into the recesses of 
Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away east- 
ward, where the sun struck opposite upon its 
snow into mighty fragments of peaked light, 
standing up behind the barred clouds of evening 
one after another, countless, the crown of the 
Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from 
pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning 
of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great 
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Letters to my Grandson 

city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as 
the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew 
nearer and nearer. 

"And at last when its walls were reached, and 
the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, 
not through towered gate or guarded rampart, 
but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in 
the Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's 
sight opened the long ranges of columned pal- 
aces — each with its black boat moored at the 
portal, each with its image cast down beneath 
its feet upon that green pavement which every 
breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessel- 
lation when first, at the extremity of the bright 
vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal 
curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the 
Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so 
adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, grace- 
ful as a bow just bent; when first, before its 
moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondo- 
lier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!' struck sharp upon the 
ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty 
cornices that half met over the narrow canal, 
where the plash of the water followed close and 
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The Glory of English Prose 

loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; 
and when at last the boat darted forth upon the 
breadth of silver sea, across which the front of 
the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine 
veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of 
Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should 
be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm 
of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to forget 
the darker truths of its history and its being. 

' ' Well might it seem that such a city had owed 
her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, 
than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters 
which encircled her had been chosen for the 
mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her 
nakedness; and that all which in Nature was 
wild or merciless — Time and Decay, as well as 
the waves and tempests — had been won to 
adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still 
spare, for ages to come, that beauty which 
seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands 
of the hour-glass as well as of the sea." 

It is now many years since I first saw Venice 
rising from the sea on a September morning as 
I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from 
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Letters to my Grandson 

Trieste ; and as we glided closer and closer its 
loveliness was slowly and exquisitely unveiled 
under the slanting beams of the early sun. 

In all my wanderings over two hemispheres 
I remember no vision so enchanting and 
unsurpassable! May you live to see it, 
Antony, before the vulgarities of modem life 
have totally defaced its beauty. 

Your loving old 
G. P. 



194 



29 

My dear Antony, 

Born in Devon at the same time — within a 
year — as Ruskin, James Anthony Froude 
wrote prose that displays the same sanguine 
and poetical characteristics. His historical 
writings have, I believe, been somewhat dis- 
credited of late years owing to the permission 
he is alleged to have given himself to warp his 
account of events in order to buttress some 
prejudice or contention of his own. 

But if we set him aside as an accurate au- 
thority, we can at once restore him to our 
regard as a lord of visionary language : — 

"Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow- 
dropping, mellow autumn of a rich, glorious 
summer. In the old man Nature has fulfilled 
her work; she leads him with her blessings; she 
fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life ; and, 
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Letters to my Grandson 

surrounded by his children and his children's 
children, she rocks him softly away to the grave, 
to which he is followed with blessings. God 
forbid we should not call it beautiful. It is 
beautiful, but not the most beautiful. 

' ' There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, 
trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow ; the 
life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle 
which no peace follows, this side of the grave; 
which the grave gapes to finish before the victory 
is won ; and — strange that it should be so — this 
is the highest life of man. 

"Look back along the great names of history; 
there is none whose life has been other than this. 
They to whom it has been given to do the really 
highest work in this earth, whoever they are, 
Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, 
legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, 
slaves — one and all, their fate has been the same 
— the same bitter cup has been given them to 
drink." 

Another passage of deep and melancholy 
beauty cannot be omitted from this volume. 
It records in language of haunting loveliness 

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The Glory of English Prose 

the passing away of feudalism and chivalry 
and of a thousand years of the pageantry of 
faith : — 



"The great trading companies were not in- 
stituted for selfish purposes, but to ensure the 
consumer of manufactured articles that what he 
purchased was properly made and of a reason- 
able price. They determined prices, fixed wages, 
and arranged the rules of apprenticeship. But 
in time the companies lost their healthy vitality, 
and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the 
reign of Elizabeth hastening away. There were 
no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient 
number who were possessed of the necessary 
probity ; and it is impossible not to connect such 
a phenomenon with the deep melancholy which, 
in those days, settled down on Elizabeth herself. 

"For indeed a change was coming upon the 
world, the meaning and direction of which even 
is still hidden from us — a change from era to 
era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages 
were broken up; old things were passing away, 
and the faith and life of ten centuries were dis- 
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Letters to my Grandson 

solving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the 
abbey and the castle were soon together to 
crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, 
beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing 
away, never to return. A new continent had 
risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of 
heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an 
infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the 
firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, 
was seen to be but a small atom in the awful 
vastness of the Universe. 

"In the fabric of habit which they had so 
laboriously built for themselves, mankind was to 
remain no longer. And now it is all gone — like 
an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between 
us and the old English there lies a gulf of mys- 
tery which the prose of the historian will never 
adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, 
and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to 
them. Only among the aisles of the cathedrals, 
only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleep- 
ing on their tombs, some faint conceptions float 
before us of what these men were when they were 
alive ; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, 
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The Glory of English Prose 

that peculiar creation of mediaeval age, which 
falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished 
world." 

The sound of church bells, being entirely the 
creation of man, forms perhaps a more touching 
link with the past for us than the eternal sounds 
of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the 
waves of the sea forms a bond between us and 
the unplimibed depths of time, as they 

"Begin and cease, and then again begin 
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring, 
The eternal note of sadness in. 
Sophocles long ago 

Heard it on the .^gean, and it brought 
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
Of human misery." 

So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is 
the sound of wind in the trees, and the voice of 
falling waters and rippling streams which must 
have fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore- 
runners as they do upon otir own. These 
eternal sounds about us take no note of our 

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Letters to my Grandson 

brief coming and going, and will be the same 
when you and I, Antony, and all the millions 
that come after us in the world have returned 
to dust. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



200 



30 

My dear Antony, 

Though I do not myself rank Matthew Ar- 
nold among the great prose writers of England, 
yet, like all true poets — and he indeed was one 
of them, — he wrote excellent English prose. 

It is true that he turned to poetry to express 
his finest emotions and thoughts, and he him- 
self alludes to his prose writings thus: "I am a 
mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, 
and I talk an artless, unstudied, everyday 
familiar language. But, after all, this is the 
language of the mass of the world." 

The chief note of all his teaching was ur- 
banity. "The pursuit of perfection," he said, 
"is the pursuit of sweetness and light . " " Cul- 
ture hates hatred : culture has one great passion 
— the passion for sweetness and light." 

This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of 
pleasantness and charm, and not at all to the 

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Letters to my Grandson 

high places of self-sacrifice, or the austere 
peaks of martyrdom. B timing indignation 
against intolerable things, fierce deniinciation 
of the cruelties and abominations of the world 
find no encouragement or sympathy from this 
serene, detached, and therefore somewhat 
ineffectual, teaching. 

Sweetness and light would never have inter- 
fered with the slave trade, or fiercely fought 
beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the sides of 
ships. 

We did not fight the Germans under the 
doctrine of sweetness and light. 

It was a beautiful and edifying adornment 
for the drawing-room in times of Victorian self- 
satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the 
battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for 
combating wrong. 

I am not siu-e that Matthew Arnold would 
not have called those who wrathfully slash 
about them at abominable evils, Philistines. 

After all, the great men of action and the 
great writers of the world have been capable of 

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The Glory of English Prose 

harbouring great enthusiasms and deep indig- 
nations in their hearts ; and these emotions do 
not emerge from a "passion for sweetness and 
Hght." 

A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try- 
to push things along cheerfully but strenu- 
ously in the right direction wherever and 
whenever you can. 

As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best 
passage is to be found in the Preface to his 
Essays in Criticism : — 

"Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so 
lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual 
life of our century, so serene ! 

* ' There are our young barbarians, all at play ! 

"And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, 
spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and 
whispering from her towers the last enchant- 
ments of the Middle Age, who will deny that 
Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever call- 
ing us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, 
to perfection, — to beauty, in a word, which is 
only truth seen from another side? — nearer 
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Letters to my Grandson 

perhaps than all the science of Tubingen. Ador- 
able dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic ! 
who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thy- 
self to sides and heroes not mine, only never to 
the Philistines! home of lost causes, and for- 
saken beliefs, and unpopular names, and im- 
possible loyalties! . . . Apparitions of a day, 
what is our puny warfare against the Phil- 
istines, compared with the warfare which this 
Queen of Romance has been waging against them 
for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?" 

As a man and a companion, ' if you expected 
nothing but delightful humour, brilliant dis- 
course, and lu-bane outlook upon everything, 
few could rival his personal charm; but he 
would never really join you in a last ditch to 
defend the right, or actually charge with you 
against the wrong, although in his poem "The 
Last Word," while not participating himself in 
such strenuous doings, he seems to yield a 
reluctant admiration to him who does so 
charge, and who leaves his ' ' body by the wall. ' ' 

' See my Memories, pp. 46-52 and 55. 
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The Glory of English Prose 

Much has happened since Matthew Arnold 
poured his scorn upon the unregenerate Phil- 
istines; but let us remember, Antony, that 
thousands and thousands of these contemned 
neglecters of sweetness and light stood un- 
flinchingly and died upon the plains of France 
that our country and its freedom should 
survive. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



205 



31 

My dear Antony, 

Like the author of the Peninsular War, Sir 
William Butler was great both as a soldier and 
as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with 
humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it 
was in his Life of Gordon of Khartoum that he 
rose to his full stature as a contributor to the 
glory of English prose. 

The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it 
were, transfigured all who approached him, 
and raised them out of themselves. One man 
alone, of all those whose lives touched his, has 
shown that his own pinched and narrow 
mediocrity was proof against the radiance of 
Gordon's spirit, and has feebly attempted to 
belittle the soldier saint for his own justifica- 
tion. But he has failed even to project a spot 
upon the sun of Gordon's fame, and he is 
already forgotten, while the great soldier's 

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The Glory of English Prose 

name will endure in the hearts of his country- 
men till England and its people fail. 

If Sir William Butler's final noble periods, 
which I here reproduce, do not deeply move 
him who reads them, then must that reader 
have a heart of stone : — 

"Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as 
unselfish as Sidney, of courage dauntless as 
Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of sym- 
pathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty 
straightforward as Napier, of faith as steadfast 
as More. Doubtful indeed is it if anywhere in 
the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier 
to equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of 
death that gives to life its real knighthood, and 
too often the soldier's end is unworthy of his 
knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of 
life and death was complete, and the closing 
scenes seem to move to their fulfilment in solemn 
hush, as though an unseen power watched over 
the sequence of their sorrow. 

"Not by the blind hazard of chance was this 
great tragedy consummated ; not by the discord 
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Letters to my Grandson 

of men or from the vague opposition of physical 
obstacle, by fault of route or length of delay, 
was help denied to him. The picture of a won- 
derful life had to be made perfect by heroic 
death. The moral had to be cut deep, and 
written red, and hung high, so that its lesson 
could be seen by all men above strife and doubt 
and discord. Nay, the very setting of the final 
scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast of 
colour that the dullest eye shall be able to read 
the meaning of it all. For many a year back this 
soldier's life has been a protest against our most 
cherished teaching. Faith is weakness, we have 
said. He will show us it is strength. Reward is 
the right of service. Publicity is true fame. Let 
us go into action with a newspaper correspondent 
riding at our elbow, or sitting in the cabin of the 
ship, has been our practice. He has told us that 
the race should be for honour, not for 'honours,' 
that we should 'give away our medal,' and that 
courage and humility, mercy and strength, 
should march hand in hand together. For many 
a year we have had no room for him in our 
councils. Our armies knew him not ; and it was 
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The Glory of English Prose 

only in semi-savage lands and in the service of 
remote empires he could find scope for his genius. 
Now our councils will be shamed in his service, 
and our armies will find no footing in our efforts 
to reach him. We have said that the Providence 
of God was only a calculation of chances ; now for 
eleven months the amazing spectacle will be 
presented to the world of this solitary soldier 
standing at bay, within thirty days' travel of the 
centre of Empire, while the most powerful king- 
dom on the earth — the nation whose wealth is 
as the sands of the sea, whose boast is that the 
sun never sets upon its dominions — is unable to 
reach him — saving he does not want — but is 
unable to reach him even with one message of 
regret for past forgetfulness. 

* ' No ; there is something more in all this than 
mistake of Executive, or strife of party, or error 
of Cabinet , or fault of men can explain . The pur- 
pose of this life that has been, the lesson of this 
death that must be , is vaster and deeper than these 
things. The decrees of God are as fixed to-day 
as they were two thousand years ago, but they 
can be worked to their conclusion by the weak- 

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Letters to my Grandson 

ness of men as well as by the strength of angels. 

"There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in 
Strathspey — once the Gordons' home — whose 
name in bygone times gave a rallying-call to a 
kindred clan. The scattered firs and wind-swept 
heather on the lone summit of Craig Ellachie 
once whispered in Highland clansmen's ear the 
warcry, ' Stand fast ! Craig Ellachie.' Many a 
year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon 
last heard from Highland hilltop the signal of 
battle, but never in Celtic hero's long record of 
honour has such answer been sent back to High- 
land or to Lowland as when this great heart 
stopped its beating, and lay 'steadfast unto 
death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds 
that moan through the pine trees on Craig Ella- 
chie have far-off meanings in their voices. Per- 
haps on that dark January night there came a 
breath from heaven to whisper to the old High- 
land rock, 'He stood fast ! Craig Ellachie.' 

"The dust of Gordon is not laid in English 
earth, nor does even the ocean, which has been 
named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its vast and 
wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. 

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The Glory of English Prose 

Somewhere, far out in the immense desert whose 
sands so often gave him rest in Hfe, or by the 
shores of that river which was the scene of so 
much of his labour, his ashes now add their wind- 
swept atoms to the mighty waste of the Soudan. 
But if England, still true to the longline of her mar- 
tyrs to duty , keep his memory precious in her heart 
— making of him no false idol or brazen image of 
glory, but holding him as he was, the mirror and 
measure of true knighthood — then better than in 
efhgy or epitaph will his life be written, and his 
nameless tomb become a citadel to his nation." 

The statue of Gordon stands in noble reverie 
in Trafalgar Square, at the centre of the Em- 
pire for whose honour he died. 

In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in efiQgy, and 
engraven upon the cenotaph can be seen the 
most splendid epitaph in the world. 

His true greatness has been recorded by 
Sir William Butler in resounding and glorious 
English; and his last great act of stainless 
nobility has received a deathless tribute. 
Your loving old, G. P. 

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32 

My dear Antony, 

I have now come down, at last, to a great 
writer of English prose who is still with us. 

Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, 
universally recognised as the greatest living 
man of letters in the British Empire; he has 
crowned a long record of distinguished literary 
achievement with his Life of Gladstone, which 
has taken its place among the noblest bio- 
graphies of the world, where it is destined to 
remain into the far future acclaimed as a 
masterpiece. In his description of the veteran 
statesman launching in the House of Com- 
mons his great project of Home Rule for 
Ireland, he has surprised himself out of his own 
reserve, and painted the scene for succeeding 
generations in colours that can never die : — 

"No such scene has ever been beheld in the 
House of Commons. Members came down at 

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The Glory of English Prose 

break of day to secure their places ; before noon 
every seat was marked, and crowded benches 
were even arrayed on the floor of the House from 
the Mace to the Bar. Princes, ambassadors, 
great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. 
The fame of the orator, the boldness of his ex- 
ploit, curiosity as to the plan, poignant anxiety 
as to the party result, wonder whether a wizard 
had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting 
out the baleful spirits that had for so many ages 
made IiTeland our torment and our dishonour — 
all these things brought together such an as- 
semblage as no minister before had ever ad- 
dressed within those world-renowned walls. 

"The Parliament was new. Many of its 
members had fought a hard battle for their 
seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven for 
half a dozen good years to come. Those who 
were moved by professional ambition, those 
whose object was social advancement, those 
who thought only of upright public service, the 
keen party of men, the men who aspire to office, 
the men with a past and the men who looked for 
a future, all alike found themselves adrift on 
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Letters to my Grandson 

dark and troubled waters. The secrets of the 
Bill had been well kept. To-day the disquieted 
host were first to learn what was the great pro- 
ject to which they would have to say that Aye 
or No on which for them and for the State so 
much would hang, 

"Of the chief comrades or rivals of the min- 
ister's own generation, the strong administrators, 
the eager and accomplished debaters, the saga- 
cious leaders, the only survivor now comparable 
to him, in eloquence or in influence, was Mr. 
Bright. That illustrious man seldom came into 
the House in those distracted days ; and on this 
memorable occasion his stern and noble head 
was to be seen in dim obscurity. 

"Various as were the emotions in other re- 
gions of the House, in one quarter rejoicing was 
unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt and no 
misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the 
Irish leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, 
energy, and spirit of command, had achieved 
this astounding result, and done that which he 
had vowed to his countrymen that he would 
assuredly be able to do. On the benches round 
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The Glory of Englisn Prose 

him genial excitement rose almost to tumult. 
Well it might. For the first time since the Union 
the Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its 
force and strength, in every aspect of policy and 
of conscience by the most powerful Englishman 
then alive. 

"More striking than the audience was the 
man; more striking than the multitude of eager 
onlookers from the shore was the rescuer, with 
deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash 
him down ; the veteran Ulysses, who, after more 
than half a century of combat, service, toil, 
thought it not too late to try a further 'work of 
noble note.' In the hands of such a master of 
the instrument the theme might easily have lent 
itself to one of those displays of exalted passion 
which the House had marvelled at in more than 
one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish 
question, or heard with reHgious reverence in his 
speech on the Affirmation Bill in 1883. 

"What the occasion now required was that 
passion should burn low, and reasoned persua- 
sion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate 
scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy 
215 



Letters to my Grandson 

to be explained and vindicated. Of that best 
kind of eloquence which dispenses with declama- 
tion this was a fine and sustained example. 
There was a deep, rapid, steady, onfiowing 
volume of arguments, exposition, exhortation. 
Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now 
and again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted 
all hearts. But political oratory is action, not 
words — action, character, will, conviction, pur- 
pose, personality. As this eager muster of men 
underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite 
in their balance and modulation, the compulsion 
of his flashing glance and animated gesture, 
what stirred and commanded them was the 
recollection of national service, the thought of 
the speaker's mastering purpose, his unflagging 
resolution and strenuous will, his strength of 
thew and sinew well tried in long years of re- 
sounding war, his unquenched conviction that 
the just cause can never fail. Few are the heroic 
moments in our parliamentary politics, but this 
was one." 

I will not trench upon politics in these let- 
ters; but I may hazard the belief that could 

216 



The Glory of English Prose 

those who rejected this noble effort, by the 
greatest statesman of the age, to assuage the 
everlasting Irish conflict, have looked into the 
future, few of them but would have supported 
it with relief and thanksgiving. 

It is generally perhaps a blessing that the 
curtain that covers the future is impenetrable ; 
but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze 
upon the appalling future, Gladstone's last 
effort for the peace of his country would surely 
not have been permitted to miscarry. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



217 



33 

My dear Antony, 

Two other living writers I will now com- 
mend to you, and then I shall have done. 

The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy 
prevision, anticipated by some decades the 
entente cordiale, and their brilliant son felici- 
tously manifests in his own person many of 
the admirable qualities of both races. In Eng- 
land he is reported to be forcefully French, and 
it may be surmised that when in France he is 
engagingly British. Fortunately for our litera- 
ture, it is in the language of his mother that 
he has found his expression. Many are the 
beautiftil utterances scattered through his 
charming works: two of the most picturesque 
deal with the greatness of France ; the subject 
of one is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the 
other the Great Napoleon : — 

218 



The Glory of English Prose 

' ' So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim 
origins stretched out and lost themselves in 
Rome ; it had already learnt to speak and recog- 
nised its own nature when the vaults of the 
Thermas echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of 
the Merovingian kings. 

"Look up the vast valley of dead men 
crowned, and you may see the gigantic figure of 
Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white 
beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his 
left hand the globe, and in his right the hilt of an 
unconquerable sword. There also are the short 
strong horsemen of the Robertian House, half 
hidden by their leather shields, and their sons 
before them growing in vestment and majesty 
and taking on the pomp of the Middle Ages; 
Louis VIL, all covered with iron; Philip, the 
Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded 
with light : they stand in a widening, intermin- 
able procession, this great crowd of kings; they 
loose their armour, they take their ermine on, 
they are accompanied by their captains and 
their marshals; at last, in their attitude and in 
their magnificence they sum up in themselves 
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Letters to my Grandson 

the pride and the achievement of the French 
nation. 

"But Time has dissipated what it could not 
tarnish, and the process of a thousand years has 
turned these mighty figures into unsubstantial 
things. You may see them in the grey end of 
darkness, like a pageant, all standing still. 
You look again, but with the growing light, and 
with the wind that rises before morning, they 
have disappeared." 



"There is a legend among the peasants in 
Russia of a certain sombre, mounted figure, un- 
real, only an outline and a cloud, that passed 
away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They 
saw him move along their snows, through the 
long mysterious twilights of the northern au- 
tumn, in silence, with the head bent and the 
reins in the left hand loose, following some endur- 
ing purpose, reaching towards an ancient soli-, 
tude and repose. They say it was Napoleon. 

' ' After him there trailed for days the shadows 
of the soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly the 

220 



The Glory of English Prose 

forms of companies of men. It was as though 
the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the 
light west wind of that June day, had received 
the spirits of twenty years of combat, and had 
drifted farther and farther during the fall of the 
year over the endless plains. 

"But there was no voice and no order. The 
terrible tramp of the Guard, and the sound that 
Heine loved, the dance of the French drums, was 
extinguished ; there was no echo of their songs, for 
the army was of ghosts and was defeated. They 
passed in the silence which we can never pierce, 
and somewhere remote from men they sleep in bi- 
vouac round the most splendid of human swords. ' ' 

Time and circumstances have changed our 
ancient enemies into our honotired friends, and 
the race that fought against us at Waterloo has 
cemented its friendship towards us with its 
blood; and as we look back over the century 
that divides us from Waterloo we can now with 
Mr. Belloc salute the sombre figure of the 
defeated conqueror. 

Your loving old G. P. 

221 



34 

My dear Antony, 

I will now quote to you one other master of 
splendid English. 

Not every temporal sovereign of these 
realms has deserved a throne among the kings 
of literatxire. James the First was a poet of 
some merit ; Charles the First wrote and spoke 
with a fine distinction ; Queen Victoria's letters 
to her subjects were models of dignified and 
kindly simplicity; but to King George the 
Fifth by the grace of God it has been reserved 
to give utterance to what I believe to be the 
most noble and uplifting address ever delivered 
by a king to his people. 

From the day of his accession King George 
has been confronted with trials and troubles 
enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none 
of us can plirnib the depth of anguish that must 

222 



The Glory of English Prose 

have been his through the awful years of the 
Great War. He has been tried and proved in 
the fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged 
ennobled by pain, and dowered by sorrow with 
a gift of expression that has placed him among 
the masters of the glory of English prose. 

On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a 
tour of the cemeteries in France at Terlinch- 
thun, where there stands on the cliffs over- 
looking the Channel a monimient to Napoleon 
and his Grand Army, and around it now lie the 
inniimerable English dead. 

Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and 
Lord Haig had in his presence clasped hands, 
and the King with a fine gesture had placed his 
own right hand upon their clasped ones and 
said, "Amis toujotirs!" We are told that, 
"going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King 
looked out over the closely marshalled graves 
to the sea, and back towards the woods and 
fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil 
stands, and seemed reluctant to leave." 

At last he turned, and, standing before the 
223 



Letters to my Grandson 

great Cross of Sacrifice, he spoke from his 
heart words that those of us, Antony, who love 
our country and the glory of its language will 
cherish while we live : — 

"For the past few days I have been on a 
solemn pilgrimage in honour of a people who died 
for all free men. 

"At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I 
followed ways already marked by many foot- 
steps of love and pride and grief, I should like to 
send a message to all who have lost those dear 
to them in the Great War, and in this the Queen 
joins me to-day, amidst these surroundings so 
wonderfully typical of that single-hearted as- 
sembly of nations and of races which form our 
Empire. For here, in their last quarters, lie 
sons of every portion of that Empire, across, as 
it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which 
they guarded, that Freedom might be saved in 
the uttermost ends of the earth. 

' ' For this, a generation of our manhood offered 

itself without question, and almost without the 

need of a summons. Those proofs of virtue, 

which we honour here to-day, are to be found 

224 



The Glory of English Prose 

throughout the world and its waters — since we 
can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth 
is girdled with the graves of our dead. Beyond 
the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, 
through Eastern Europe in well-nigh unbroken 
chain they stretch, passing over the holy Mount 
of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the In- 
dian and Pacific Oceans — from Zeebrugge to 
Coronel, from Dunkirk to the hidden wilder- 
nesses of East Africa. 

"But in this fair land of France, which sus- 
tained the utmost fury of the long strife, our 
brothers are numbered, alas! by hundreds of 
thousands. 

"They lie in the keeping of a tried and gener- 
ous friend, a resolute and chivalrous comrade-in- 
arms, who with ready and quick sympathy has 
set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, 
so that we ourselves and our descendants may 
for all time reverently tend and preserve their 
resting-places. 

"And here, at Terlinchthun, the shadow of his 
monument falling almost across their graves, 
the greatest of French soldiers — of all soldiers— 

15 225 



Letters to my Grandson 

stands guard over them. And this is just, for 
side by side with the descendants of his incom- 
parable armies they defended his land in defend- 
ing their own. 

"Never before in history have a people thus 
dedicated and maintained individual memorials 
to their fallen, and, in the course of my pilgrim- 
age, I have many times asked myself whether 
there can be more potent advocates of peace 
upon earth through the years to come than this 
massed multitude of silent witnesses to the 
desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as 
we have faith in God's purposes, we cannot but 
believe that the existence of these visible me- 
morials will eventually serve to draw all peoples 
together in sanity and self-control, even as it 
has already set the relations between our Em- 
pire and our Allies on the deep-rooted bases of a 
common heroism and a common agony. 

"Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, 
facing the great Stone of Remembrance, and 
compassed by these sternly simple headstones, 
we remember, and must charge our children to 
remember, that as our dead were equal in sacri- 
226 



The Glory of English Prose 

fice, so are they equal in honour, for the greatest 
and the least of them have proved that sacrifice 
and honour are no vain things, but truths by 
which the world lives. 

"Many of the cemeteries I have visited in the 
remoter and still desolate districts of this sorely 
stricken land, where it has not yet been possible 
to replace the wooden crosses by headstones, 
have been made into beautiful gardens which are 
lovingly cared for by comrades of the war. 

* ' I rejoice I was fortunate enough to see these 
in the spring, when the returning pulse of the 
year tells of unbroken life that goes forward in 
the face of apparent loss and wreckage; and I 
fervently pray that, both as nations and individ- 
uals, we may so order our lives after the ideals 
for which our brethren died that we may be able 
to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly 
but unashamed." 

Hard indeed must it be for any Englishman 
whose heart is quick within his bosom not to 
feel it beat faster with thanksgiving and pride 
as he reads the flawless periods of this glorious 
speech. 

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Letters to my Grandson 

As the final word of consolation, sanctifica- 
tion, and benediction, closing the awful agony 
of the greatest of all wars, preserve, Antony, 
this magnificent threnody in yotir memory 
imperishable. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



228 



35 

My dear Antony, 

I have come now to the end of my citations 
for the present. My object, Antony, has been 
to rouse in your heart, if I can, a love, admira- 
tion, and reverence for the wonders to be found 
in the treasure-house of EngHsh prose 
literature. 

I have only opened a little door here and 
there, so that you can peep in and see the 
visions of splendour within. 

Some day perhaps, when you have explored 
for yourself, you may feel siu-prised that in 
these letters I have quoted nothing from Sir 
John Eliot, or Addison, or Scott, or Thackeray, 
or Charles Lamb, or De Quincey, or Hazlitt, or 
other kings and princes of style innumerable. 
Many, many writers whom I have not quoted 
in these letters have adorned everything they 

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Letters to my Grandson 

touched, but do not seem to me to reach the 
snow-line or rise into great and moving elo- 
quence. Charles Lamb, for example, never 
descends from his equable and altogether 
pleasing level, far above the plain of the com- 
monplace, but neither does he reach up to the 
lofty altitudes of the lonely peaks; and if I 
began to quote from him, I see no obstacle to 
my quoting his entire works ! And of Addison, 
Johnson wrote, "His page is always Itiminous, 
but never blazes in unexpected splendour"; 
and he adds, "Whoever wishes to attain an 
English style, familiar but not coarse, and 
elegant but not ostentatious, must give his 
days and nights to the volumes of Addi- 
son/* 

In selecting such passages as I have in these 
letters I have necessarily followed my own 
taste, and taste — as I said when I first began 
writing to you — is illusive. I could do no more 
than cite that which makes my own heart beat 
faster from a compelling sense of its nobility 
and beauty. 

230 



The Glory of English Prose 

When I was young, Antony, I lived long in 
my father's house among his twelve thousand 
books, with his scholarly mind as my compan- 
ion, and his exact memory as my guide; for 
more than a quarter of a century since those 
days I have lived in the more modest library 
of my own collecting, and have long learnt how 
much fine literature there is that I have never 
read, and now can never read. But, Antony, 
you may not find, in these crowded days, even 
so much time for reading, or so much repose 
for study as I have found, and therefore it is 
that I have offered you in these letters the 
preferences of my lifetime, even though it 
has been the lifetime of one who makes no 
claim to be a literary authority. 

As you look back at those from whom you 
have sprung, you will see that for five genera- 
tions they have been men of letters — ^many 
distinguished, and one world-famous; and 
though I myself am but a puny link in the 
chain, yet I may perhaps afford you the op- 
portunity of hitching your wagon by and by to 

231 



Letters to my Grandson 

the star that has for so long ruled the destinies 
of otir house. 

Farewell, then, dear Antony; and if "the 
dear God who loveth us" listens to the bene- 
dictions of the old upon their children's chil- 
dren, may He guide and bless you to your life's 
end. 

Your loving old 

G. P. 



232 



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